[Usability]A (Re)"search" idea

[Joaquin Cuenca Abela <e98cuenc free fr>]

Hi,

My usability profesor at the university showed us
several (imo) very good ideas.

I've (re)implemented one of these ideas in gtk+.  The
goal is to provide a new interface for the usual
"search" and "search & replace" actions in a text
editor (Sam, if we're still hearing, that may be a
good add-on for AbiWord.  Idem for the gedit guys.)

One of the usual ways to provide the "Search"
functionality is popup a dialog box when the user
request it.  Something as
http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/merchan/shots/gedit-Replace.png

One problem with this kind of approach, is that the
dialog box can be placed over the searched text, so
the user can not always find quickly the text.

(MS Word solves this problem moving randomly the
dialog box if the match is under the window, but that
induces some other problems.  For instance, if you're
clicking repeteadly in the search button, and the
dialog box moves, you can click outside the dialog
box.)

Another problem is that this is a very "serial" way of
do the search.  You should step match by match until
you find the match that you're looking for.

Usual options presented to the user related to the
search are:

an edit box to put the text to search
a search button
a "wrap around" button
a search backwards button
an option to repeat the last search

The proposed alternative is to put the edit box at the
top of the application (in a kind-of-toolbar), and
remove everything else.  That way, there is no more a
dialog box that can cover the searched text.

The computer redo the search on each key press.  That
way you remove the need for the search button.

You highlight with an special color at the same time
all the matches.  To show the user the matches that
are outside the visible window, you draw little
horizontal lines in the vertical scrollbar, at the
vertical position of the match.  That way you remove
the need for the "search backwards" button, the
"repeat the last search" option, and the "wrap around"
button.  In addition, the user can see at a glance all
the matches, and don't have to search match by match
until it hits the match that interest him.

The "replace" part is a natural extension.  You need
another edit box for let the user type its replacement
text.  To do the replace, the user should just click
in the match that he wants to replace.  The match will
then be replaced, and highlighted with a different
color.  If the user clicks again in a replaced text,
we switch to the original text.  That way the user can
undo any replacement (and not necessarily in the same
order in which the replace was done).

You can see a screenshot and the code source of this
idea at http://e98cuenc.free.fr/search/ &
http://e98cuenc.free.fr/search/search.png

So, what do you think of all that?  I'm specially
interested in hearing the opinion of gedit/AbiWord
people (I'm familiarized with AbiWord's code, and
gedit is relatively trivial, so I don't think that
there are many technical difficulties to implement
that).

Ok, I don't have a "Microsoft is doing it" argument,
but IMO this interface is much better than what MS is
doing anyway :)

Cheers,

--
Joaquin Cuenca Abela