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Searching within the community

Ryan_Gilmore

The following started as email thread. I'm moving this to the community to continue the conversation and allow others to express thoughts.

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Hey guys,

Just thought I would give my personal opinion on searching within the community. First my flow to get into the community is to google my question and add "jmp" at the end. For example, "Manipulating Control Charts jmp". That usually results in sending me to the discussions (or some other section) within the community. What I noticed is once I enter a certain section of the community and I want to search again, it default filters to that board that I am in. For example, if I googled "custom jmp addin", it may take me to the jmp blog section, from there if I use the search bar to ask a new question, the search is already filtered to posts within the blog section board (Limiting the results to 500 out of possible 1200 posts within all the boards). I realize that the user can change from "This board" to all, but I just thought it would be more helpful to me as user to have it default to all on search. I understand how if we think the user wants to stay within the board they're in, it makes sense to use this default filter. However, for me this is never the case as I don't care where the information comes from as long as I can find an answer. Just my thoughts...

Chris Costin

Accepted answers

All comments

Ryan_Gilmore

I would agree with you. I think it would be better to organize the results so that the filtering could after the search, if needed. To me, this does a few things:

Exposes the user to options not previously known
Eliminates the need for the user to understand how the site is organized
Prevents the user from having to perform the search more than once

How a user finds information in the community is one of the themes I have that needs to be investigated.

On a side note, interesting that you start with Google. What could we do to make you start with the community?

IanAtJMP

I'm not sure if we can configure that. I would hope so, but it's Lithium and we'll have to look into it.

ChrisCostin

In response to Ryan, I find googles search feature more visually attracive because the search bar is highlighted and is really the main focus of the page. One thing I would change for our seach bar is to maybe center is within the page (it seems skewed left and too long), and also add grayed out text (and a logo) such as "search" . To me, highlighting our search feature is important because I feel it is the main driver of users to the community. I have attached a few changes just based on my opinions...

IanAtJMP

These are good suggestions, and we'll keep working on this.

ChrisCostin

Example with a side menu....

Ryan_Gilmore

It seems there is little that we can do to improve the search capability within the Community. The best we can do is to encourage the use of good titles/subjects on posts. Will need to think about how to do that.

Khoros has a best practices article related to searching.

As part of JMPCOM-35, we now have some information about what terms are being used to search both to get to the Community and within the Community. Need to further review.

Some potential changes that need further thought:

Promoted search. What articles would be most helpful based on search terms?
Custom Dictionary. In Studio, Spellchecker > Global. This would prevent suggestions for commonly used terms, e.g. JMP, JSL. Currently, JMP is the only item in the dictionary.

Graph Builder and Data Table are two of the more popular terms based on a Text Explorer analysis. The home page and Discussions area are the two places where users are apt to perform a search. So, what does this mean? I'm not entirely sure.

Based on the word cloud results from Text Explorer, JSL is the only "word" that should be added to the custom dictionary (if for no other reason than the search results won't display, "Did you mean"). (JMPCOM-264)