2. “Investigate how other applications & sites provide advanced
search functionality, and propose some alternatives with pros &
cons for how Vault could offer this capability. “
“The target persona is a business user who is familiar with
consumer web sites & uses Microsoft Windows, but is by no
means a power user or technical whiz. “
4. “Often, advanced search is a clumsy add-on that’s rarely
used, and it lets engineers and designers take the easy way out.
Valuable features that are difficult to integrate into the main
interface can be relocated to the ghetto and forgotten. “
Peter Morville and Jefferey Callender
Search Patterns – Design for Discovery (2009)
5. “The advanced search page can provide a variety of fancy
options, including Booleans, scopes, and various parametric
searches. It is important to use an intimidating name like
"advanced search" to scare off novice users from getting into the
page and hurting themselves“
- Jakob Nielsen
Search And You May Find (1997)
8. “The people who do use Advanced Search are your most
fanatical users, the professional librarians … and investigators“
- Tim Bray, Google
On Search - The Users (2003)
ProsFairly simplified advanced searchGood at performing simpler, non-aggregate queriesConsHarder to cover edge cases. Lack of aggregation and compound queriesRequires a fair amount of user research and data to identify most important search attributesFeedback is not immediate, and can lead to failure cases or null results.
ProsNatural Extension of facetsFairly simple to use.Immediate feedback and previewing reduces failure ratesCons- May not perform well when user has to perform a search inside the body of textNot possible to create more powerfulcompound queriesNo wild card searching and partial matchesRequires pre-filtering of data set. May not perform well if data set is too varied or too large and diverse.
Pros:- Extremely powerful with compound queriesIf designed well can cover almost all edge cases.Easily configurable. Can add or remove as many attributes as possible to control queries.ConsExtremely technical. Higher barrier to entry.Higher chance of failure or null result.No immediate feedback.
Advanced Search- Satisfies even the toughest edge cases- Greatest learning curve
Power Search- Satisfies even the toughest edge cases- Greatest learning curve