#7969 NORM 8.2.1: Accidental searches lead to a "blank" Home screen

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#7969: Accidental searches lead to a "blank" Home screen
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   Reporter:  pgf     |       Owner:  morgs                            
       Type:  defect  |      Status:  new                              
   Priority:  normal  |   Milestone:  8.2.1                            
  Component:  sugar   |     Version:  Development build as of this date
 Resolution:          |    Keywords:                                   
Next_action:  code    |    Verified:  0                                
  Blockedby:          |    Blocking:                                   
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Changes (by Eben):

 * cc: christinamarc (added)


Comment:

 Two possible approaches to the issue:

 1. Better feedback

 In this approach, we do as you say, and ensure that it's quite clear that
 there are no matching activities.  This solves the "blank screen", but
 doesn't fix the problem of winding up in list view, instead of favorites
 view.  In any case, we should be implementing this feedback anyway.

 2. Better search

 A better solution is to implement a search specific to the view.  In
 favorites view, this might amount to changing the activities which are
 shown in the view so that they match the search.  This is nice because it
 means you might be able to search "games" to see all the games installed;
 or "TamTam" to see the various activities in the suite, etc.  (This could
 even be used quicksilver-style in Home if only one activity matches the
 query...food for thought.) However, there are difficulties in getting this
 right for a number of reasons.

 First, for this to be useful, we have to show results from the set of
 ''all'' activity, not just favorites.  This is, in a sense, contrary to
 the view itself.  It would be a view that shows favorites (starred
 activities), unless you enter a query in which case your "temporary
 favorites" are those which match the search.  This is acceptable to me on
 the grounds of providing a view which shows me "the stuff I'm likely to
 care the most about right now". (Such a name for the view itself doesn't
 satisfy, for obvious reasons.)

 Second, we have a variety of layouts for the view.  How do we show search
 results in a 2D, non-list view?  Well, I do have an answer, and the answer
 is "the same way we show results in the the Groups and Neighborhood
 views".  Of course, we haven't built that yet, but the idea is that the
 query would yield some set of results S1, from which a smaller subset of
 most relevant results S2 (which could be shown on screen at once) is
 chosen, which is then displayed in a radial fashion, with the most
 relevant results nearest the center of the screen (arbitrary theta, for
 now).  This could work in the Home view nicely as well, I think. (As a
 side note, the issue that occurs when S2 ≪ S1 is resolved by a) viewing
 the list which scales to show all of S1, or b) by adjusting the
 search/filter to adjust relevancy, thereby massaging S2 into a set I
 really care about.)



 I'm open to ideas on both of these ideas.  The short term "win" is the
 first option, but I place "win" in quotes because I'm not sure that it
 actually makes the experience all that much better.  Switching the view as
 a result of a search is suboptimal.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7969#comment:12>
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