Re: [Usability] Re: Standardizing Find and Replace windows

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Michael Toomim wrote:

> Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 22:57:56 -0700
> From: Michael Toomim <toomim ocf berkeley edu>
> To: Usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Re: Standardizing Find and Replace windows
>
> Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
>
> > Next, something that's always bothered me about those search windows. Is
> > there a situation in which the user would prefer to have no results
> > returned, rather than have the search auto-wrap?
>
> Yes.  Say, for instance, that a user wants to find out if there are any
> sentences about fancy cars in a set of documents.  So she clicks find,
> types in "car", and clicks "find next" until she sees a match for "car"
> in a sentence that talks about them being fancy.  In this situation,
> she'd like to stop when she's visited all references for the word "car",
> so that she knows that none of the matches were what she was looking for.

I dont think this alone is enough reason not to have automatic wrapping
to the start of the document.
What this does means that before auto wrap happens there needs to be some
sort of a clear break and indication that the search has been wrapped.
A popup message is too intrusive for users who like the auto wrap, and a
status bar message might not be enough for those who dont, a short No-Op
or some sort of Pause before wrapping might provide a clear enough
indication of what is happening.  Presumably there must be program out
there already that has gotten this right.

Any minute now some one is going to mention vi and emacs and talk about an
advanced search that highlights every occurance of the search terms in the
document, and it is all going to get far too complicated.  Ooops too late,
I just did.  This is deja vu all over again.

Keep it simple, know your target audience (I cant believe I even need to
say this).  The kind of search features required by Gedit are (or at least
should be) very different from the needs of an application like Anjuta
DevStudio.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/