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

[Dan Zlotnikov <dzlotnik perpugilliam csclub uwaterloo ca>]

It seems that the discussion is drifting away from the modal dialogue
idea, but just in case we do come back to it...

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Michael Toomim wrote:

> 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.

Okay, scenario: User is searching for an occurence of "car" somewhere
below the cursor. She clicks "find next" a few dozen times, discovers that
there is no match in the context she wants. The question is, what does she
do next:

1) She closes the dialogue and continues working. Nothing wrong there,
current proposal accomodates this.
2) She wants to find that match regardless of where in the file it is
located. Maybe she just forgot it was above the cursor. She has to check
off the "wrap search" button, and then click "find next." Please note,
click, not hit "enter," since the selection has been moved from the
default button.

If the search auto-wraps, on the other hand...

1) She finds no matches before the end of the file, sees a non-modal
message appear in the dialogue, saying something like "search wrapped to
beginning of file." She closes the dialogue and continues working, nothing
wrong there.
2) She wants that match, so she continues going through the file until she
finds the right match *above* the original cursor position. All she had
to do for this is keep hitting "enter."

However, with all that, I'm for eliminating the dialogue completely :)