Thursday 15 December 2011

'Index filters sometimes produce prohibitively long lists': ReScript querying issue 9

Page section
Index

Heuristic
Efficiency

Description
Index filters sometimes produce very long lists, which are unwieldy to navigate.

Impact severity
Medium

Recommend
Remove the Index section. The new design will incorporate a search function with either predictive text, or alphabetical sections.

Examples
There are currently 4,000 surnames listed in the Parish Clerks’ Memoranda Books.
Figure 9—1: the length of site menus is subject to every variation within the text

Quantitative measure
Click where you would expect to search for the surname “Gaveston".

Reflections
This issue was not tested because of it was covered within the tests for the other search-based issues. It reminds us of issue #1, in which historians did not adopt the functionality which comes from seeing text as a 'database of words'. For many users, free-text search is an essential (non-negotiable?) part of the research process.

Bruce Tate, Project Manager
Donna Baillie, Project Officer

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