Don't Help Me So Much - Usability Musings

Last week we got some feedback on the dynamic Contact Search feature - in the form of a bug report. The topic was "Autofill is too aggressive". The search box was being auto-filled based on the first few letters typed - and the auto-filling was often NOT helpful. It sometimes jumped ahead and completed the field with a different name then the one they were looking for. The existing behavior also made it impossible to trigger a search for all contacts with a particular last name (e.g. find my all 'Adams' records). You also can't look for names using a "wildcard" (%) at the beginning. This can be useful when looking for households or organizations where you know the second part of the name. For example, looking for the "Atlanta Audobon Society" - you could search for "%Audobon". Kurund and I discussed the feedback - and Kurund found a quick method of disabling the autofill behavior in all the places we use this search box. With autofill turned off - the list possible matches still displayed below the input box - and any of them can be selected with the down arrow. But... the widget doesn't attempt to type ahead of the user and fill in the box. I spent some time trying the modified search box - in Contact Search, in selecting Country and State while editing a contact, and finding target contacts for relationships. I found the new behavior to be MUCH more comfortable - which made me wonder why we hadn't gotten feedback or suggestions on this before now. It seemed to me that the autofill was just "trying to hard to help" - and actually getting in the way. That said, we would really like to hear from other folks who use the search boxes in CiviCRM regularly. Please take a minute to compare the new behavior on the 2.0 sandbox - to the existing autofill behavior on the 1.9 demo. Let us know which seems more comfortable / more usable to YOU. Beyond this one area - we'd like to hear more feedback over the coming months regarding specific usability issues. The more specific the feedback, the better. Let us know about things you do regularly in CiviCRM that seem hard - and include specific suggestions about how they could be made easier. I've added a new Usability Suggestions board to the forums - so you can post and discuss issues and suggestions. Of course, if you have resources to help make some of your suggestions a reality - let us know that too.