As a web developer, I get annoyed by interaction design implementations all the time: Why is that a link instead of a form button?
, Why doesn’t that scale when I bump up the font size?
, Why am I being asked to enter this unnecessary information?
… Usually I can brush off these annoyances and continue my journey along the threads of the World Wide Web but there’s one “feature” that has irked me to point of distraction and it’s all the more irritating for being on a site I use habitually: Upcoming.
As an Upcoming user, I have a default location. In my case it’s Brighton. This location is important. My location determines what content gets served up to me on the front page of the site—a useful way of discovering local events of interest.
The site also has a search feature. The search form has two components: what I’m searching for and where I’m searching for it. The “where” field defaults to my location, which is a handy little touch. If I want to search for something outside my current location—say the Future of Web Design conference in London this April—I can enter “Future of Web Design” in the “what” field and delete “Brighton” from the “where” field, replacing it with “London”. That works: I have now narrowed down my search to the location “London.”
Here’s the problem: if I now return to the front page I will find that my location is London. That’s right: simply by searching in a place, the system assumes that I now want that to be my location. You know what they say about assumptions, right? In this case, not only has it made an ass out of me, it has, over time, instilled a fear of searching.
I’ll be in San Francisco at the end of this month so I’d like to see what’s going on while I’m there. But once I’ve finished my searching I must remember to reset my location back to Brighton. Knowing this makes me hesitant to use the search form. No doubt the justification for this unexpected behaviour in the search is to second-guess what people really want: do as I want, not as I say. But when I search, I really just want to search. I suspect the same is true of most people.
Normally I wouldn’t rant about an obviously-flawed feature but in this case it’s a feature that can be easily fixed by simply being removed. Here is the current flow:
- The user enters a search term in the “what” field, a location in the “where” field and submits the search form.
- The system returns a list of search results for the specified term in the specified place.
- The system changes the user’s location to the specified place.
That third step is completely unnecessary. Its omission would not harm the search functionality one whit and it would make the search interface more truthful and less duplicitous.
I’ve already mentioned this on the Upcoming suggestion board. If you can think of a good reason why the current behaviour should stay, please add your justification there. If, like me, you’d like to see a search feature that actually just searches, please let your voice be heard there too.
Please Leonard, Neil, I kvetch because I care. I use Upcoming all the time. It would be a butt-kicking service if it weren’t for this one glaring flaw… even without a liquid layout.
Update: Fixed!