One thing I find frustrating about the our.umbraco.org site is the Search. It is not;
1/ Context sensitive, so although you can restrict it to the Forum, Wiki, or Project when you are in one of these sections the search is not restricted to that section and the results it pulls in are from all three sections. This could be seen as a UI issue; if the Search box was above the main nav it would be seen to cover all the sections but as it is below and the tab indicator appears to point from the Search box to the tab for Forum, Wiki, or Projects one expects it to be confined to the section indicated. So the choices are to;
moving it to above the main nav or
change the way the search functions so that it is context sensitive
2/ The biggest problem is that the Search is set to use OR for multiple words instead of AND, so adding search terms actually increases the number of results rather than narrowing down. Thinking of it as a Venn diagram each search term has a group of results. When using more than one search term what a user is usually interested in is the intersection between the groups of results, i.e. the results that contain both terms, but what we get is the total set of results from both search terms combined. This may be useful in statistical research, but for searching it's not useful at all. Instead of the set of results becoming more focussed the more terms you put in, the results become more difuse. Who ever is in control of this functionality please change the way it works as it would improve the ability of people who are new to Umbraco to find the answers to their problems and anything that makes it easier to use will promote it's use.
our.umbraco.org Search issues
One thing I find frustrating about the our.umbraco.org site is the Search. It is not;
1/ Context sensitive, so although you can restrict it to the Forum, Wiki, or Project when you are in one of these sections the search is not restricted to that section and the results it pulls in are from all three sections. This could be seen as a UI issue; if the Search box was above the main nav it would be seen to cover all the sections but as it is below and the tab indicator appears to point from the Search box to the tab for Forum, Wiki, or Projects one expects it to be confined to the section indicated. So the choices are to;
2/ The biggest problem is that the Search is set to use OR for multiple words instead of AND, so adding search terms actually increases the number of results rather than narrowing down. Thinking of it as a Venn diagram each search term has a group of results. When using more than one search term what a user is usually interested in is the intersection between the groups of results, i.e. the results that contain both terms, but what we get is the total set of results from both search terms combined. This may be useful in statistical research, but for searching it's not useful at all. Instead of the set of results becoming more focussed the more terms you put in, the results become more difuse. Who ever is in control of this functionality please change the way it works as it would improve the ability of people who are new to Umbraco to find the answers to their problems and anything that makes it easier to use will promote it's use.
Thank you
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