Consistent UX or labelling for Collection Discovery search box
Ideal solution: The Collection Discovery search box should be persistent and always search at the item level within all collections (as it does in the lobby) in order to provide a logical, consistent user experience.
Secondary solution: the label text should be editable for each search box separately to make it clear what is being searched on the page.
Problem:
- The lobby search box is for everything
- The top-level collection search box is for the title of sub-collections in that area only
- The sub-collection search box is for items in that sub-collection only.
Yet, all three options say "search" and are defined by one singular label. This is an entirely mystifying experience to users.
Laura Percival
shared this idea
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Manu Schwendener commented
I agree that it is a strange construct.
Having separate labels to inform the patrons about what they are going to search in (instead of informing them _after_ the search about what they just did), would help - and could be done with relatively little effort?----
What I would like to see are some radio buttons (= mutually exclusive), visible on any level of the collection discovery
- search only this collection
- search this collection and its sub-collections
- search all collections----
Related: truncation not possible https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/308176-primo/suggestions/45074038-searching-in-the-collection-discovery-exact-searc
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Stacey van Groll
commented
We’ve used ‘Search collections’ as the consistent labelling because all of the options either have this initially, or have the option to expand to it with one click, per the November 2021 Release
* The lobby search box is for everything --- yes, agreed.
* The top-level collection search box is for the title of sub-collections in that area only --- this searches titles of child collections and items within the top-level collection in the initial query. I believe it’s quite common for sites to not have items directly within the top-level collection level when they also have child collections, but it can be seen as being done in the results split into section of Collections (x) and Items in the collection (y). Then there is the option to expand the search into all collections in Collection Discovery by the hyperlink option for ‘Try searching in all collections’
* The sub-collection search box is for items in that sub-collection only --- yes, with the same optional workflow to expand by ‘Try searching in all collections’Ex Libris advised this the possible options given the search scoping infrastructure.
I agree that the need for the extra click by initial scoping is a little less than ideal, but we haven't had any comments on this with our 'Search collections' labelling.