Maybe I’ll be navigating around Rails projects in a more coordinated fashion eventually, but right now I’m finding myself doing a full-project search for a string I saw in the rendered page somewhere. I don’t have to worry about whether it occurred in a template or a partial (or someplace else it really shouldn’t be), I’m just taken to the right place.
Jef Raskin promoted tossing out folders and filenames and so forth in favor of just searching the text of documents. He argued they’re overhead that people don’t use anyway. And seeing the rise of Google and desktop search (not to mention witnessing my own behavior), I think I agree.
Richard Karpinski | 31-Dec-08 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
Still Jef thought the documents should have a location (or more than one?) in the zoom world. It showed up well in his zoom world design for a hospital information system where complete novices learned an entire new system with one single minute of training.
I attribute that to tens of millions of years of our ancestors who made it back to the nest, so geographic navigation talent is in our DNA. We don’t forget where the couch or the fridge lives in our home.
I want to make the zooming even easier by doing it automatically. See JustGo on my website.
jay | 31-Dec-08 at 5:51 pm | Permalink
JustGo does look interesting, and I like the idea of not having to zoom manually. I do agree testing would be needed, though; it could get real annoying having to mouse around a minefield of zoom boxes (even if I did have to pause on the item, I’d have to stop and think where my mouse was placed all the time). I suppose all this is covered in the Nat Fast conversation, though I haven’t had a chance to read that in detail.
And yes, I agree that a location-based interface is likely necessary (and probably zooming too). I just hope that LEAP/incremental search doesn’t get de-emphasized if a system implements both.