Re: Search in a Treeview

Search and Hierarchical Browsing (i.e. Trees) are incompatible.

That's because what "matches" the search criteria is likely to be all-over-the-place in the hierarchy.  Tree widgets and other widgets for browsing hierarchies are simply not good UI to represent objects widely-scattered within a hierarchy.

That's because Hierarchical Browsing (trees) requires the user to drill-down through intermediate objects (then enclosing hierarchy) to find an object (in this case, a search-criteria-matching object).

Also, drill down is ok for browsing, but incompatible with Searching when those intermediate objects don't match the search criteria.  Why are the intermediate nodes included in the result set if they don't match the criteria?  Because of the mechanics of Hierarchical Browsing, intermediate objects have to be included, to retain the organizational "skeleton" of the tree.  Thus problem #1 the search results include objects which do not match the search criteria-- breaking the metaphor for search.

Problem #2 is that manipulating such a tree to peruse some of the "matching" search results would be horribly unusable/annoying.  Consider a hierarchy that's 5 levels deep with an average of 10 items at each level of the hierarchy.  That's a total of 10^5 intermediate nodes (100,000 objects searchable).  Now consider doing a search which matches 1% of all objects (1,000 hits).  Assume these are evenly distributed.  Thus, a poor user could only visually scan search results by opening 10,000 nodes in the tree, which would take an eternity (and probably crash the UI).

Basically the user's task is very different when browsing a hierarchy and when searching a 'space'.   Searching, at least for contemporary users with some experience, is a directed task where users know to enter sufficient search criteria to get them a sufficiently small result set, or where results are sorted where the most-salient results are sorted to the top (Google).   Browsing a well-organized hierarchical taxonomy is a completely different task-- making a series of coarse, intermediate, and then fine choices to get closer and closer to the desired target.  Nothing about searching is about making a series of choices in a fixed taxonomy; nothing about browsing is about being specific enough about unrelated search criteria.   Note that refining search criteria in several steps is kind 
 of like making a series of choices, except that these are quick, brainless decisions about choosing from a small number of fixed taxonometric choices; the mental processes during search ref!
 inement are more intense mental analysis- formulating more expressive search criteria.

Both Windows and Mac do a good job of offering separate UIs for browsing a file-system hierarchy from searching a file-system hierarchy.  There's a reason for this!   Note how in both cases, search results are always displayed as a flat list.  (Windows XP has the better UI here over Mac Leopard+, by including in the results table the PATH of each item... that is the connection between search results and where they 'live' in the hierarchy-- that appears to be the justification you gave for using a tree-- well this is evidence that the information you need is possible to render without using a tree).  Study them !


NOTE: for the same above reasons, "Filtering" (as opposed to Searching) on a Tree is also usually problematic.  Specialized applications might require it, but I'd be VERY careful in combining search with hierarchical browsing in any context.



On Feb 11, 2011, at 1:10pm, allu somnadh wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> Daily life of UX Designer - Battle with Development every time you propose a
> new concept.
> 
> *Today's battle - Search in a Treeview*.
> 
> User's - Skilled Users dealing with huge amounts of data (data analytics).
> 
> Scenario - Our User's deal with a limited set of data objects (approximately
> 10,000). We present these data ojects (4 different types)  in a windows
> explorer format - Treeview with multiple nodes (max levels - 5).
> 
> Workflow - User need to locate 1-n data objects through the Data Explorer
> and launch a module to run data Analytics.
> 
> Issue: I'm proposing a search in the Treeview which is actually filtering
> the tree to only show the search objects retaining the treeview. The results
> only show the searched objects with any hierarchy associated with it. Need
> the hierarchy since it gives the object a context and help the User identify
> the right object in case of multiple results with the same name.
> 
> Looks like search results in a tree node is not a convention, and
> development wants to implement a flat list because it's for them and quote
> some Usability issues which make no sense to me.
> 
> So, I'm looking out for some guidance / feedback from folks here on this
> concept , attaching a mockup. Does any one know of examples where they have
> implemented search in a treeview.
> 
> Thank you in advance!
> 
> Best Regards
> 
> Gattu
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