"Reset filters" feature somewhat counterintuitive when using search field

[Barbara]

Hi,

I’ve been trying out the filter bar, and I’m noticing myself that in some cases, there is a short moment of “Why is nothing showing up, I know for sure there should be something”… After a short while I realized that I still had a search term set up in my Search-field.

I can imagine other users/our customers to encounter this as well, since “Searching” can be considered “Filtering” the results as well. Is there something that can be done, to help users deal with this situation better?

I can imagine a solution where, when people click on the “Reset filters”-button twice, it shows a tooltip saying something like “Are you expecting results, but not seeing anything? Make sure that the Search-field is empty or changed as well, before continuing”.

Does that sound reasonable?

[Geoff]

Hi Hans,

Glad to see you’re putting the Filter Bar license to good use already. 🙂

You know, I’d be interested in digging into this a little more. I haven’t personally seen reports of confusion reported here in the forums or our user testing experiments, but there’s always room for improvement.

Would you be willing to post this idea to our feature request forum? And, when you do, it would be super helpful to perhaps provide a rough sketch or two of how you see that working with the existing layout, or a revised version of it. That will give us some fuel for a good discussion and allow other folks to vote on the outcome as well.

A couple of other things to consider in your post:

• Highlighting fields once the search runs
• Helper text that summarizes the filtering criteria after the results are returned
• How this would be affected in both horizontal and vertical layout

Thanks so much!
Geoff

 

[Barbara]

Hi Geoff,

Will certainly do that!
I see there is a similar idea already, and I have upvoted it already. It already has 14 votes, so it seems logical that other users are experiencing this as well.

I think combining the Filter Bar with the regular Search Bar in one seemless interface, would be the best way to approach this, as Thomas Davis has pointed out above.

I’ll try to work out a bit how I see this, and add it as a comment to the link above.

[Geoff]

Perfect! Man, I’m really sorry I didn’t have that direct link for you. I must have looked right past it, but I’m super glad you found it and that’s an excellent place to contribute additional thoughts, feedback and sketches. 🙂

Geoff

[Barbara]

Geoff,

Found a fitting picture I wanted to share. No worries, I hope this gets on the radar of the devs as soon as possible!

[Geoff]

Hahaha! I love it. 🙂

Thanks again for all your feedback, dude. I’ll go ahead and close this thread but let’s aim to keep the dialogue on this one going in the feature request forum.

Cheers!
Geoff

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