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A few good guidelines, but the author states this as generic autocomplete 'rules', and I feel a lot of bias and assumptions coming from programming and terminal

A few good guidelines, but the author states this as generic autocomplete 'rules', and I feel a lot of bias and assumptions coming from programming and terminal contexts. > If there are no subsequence/substring matches, it can optionally fall back to approximate matches. This is rarely necessary to provide Supporting proximity matches is critical for anything dealing with city names, landmarks, events, person or commercial names, etc, where typos and mixed language input are a normal occurrence. This applies to almost every e-commerce site out there. > Matches should be sorted alphabetically This is countered by a few other of his own rules, such as 'prefix matches come first', 'exact matches come first'. Again, in some applications the best behaviour might be sorting by distance, recent use, relevance, popularity, ratings. Sorting is entirely domain-specific. > If an option is highlighted, never change it, even if new data is loaded I don't get this one. If I have the second item selected, and search for a completely new term, should the item remain wedged in the new results at the same position?

jakobegger 8y ago
>> If an option is highlighted, never change it, even if new data is loaded >I don't get this one. If I have the second item selected, and search for a completely new term, should the item remain wedged in the new results at the same position? I think the author means "never change it without user input". The problem is that Autocomplete is often slow, so developers load suggestions asynchronously, and may update suggestions shown to the user after better suggestions have been loaded. If a suggestion was already highlighted at that point, the system should not change it, to avoid the case where the user tries to commit a suggestion, but the system changes it just before the user hits the key to commit the suggestion.
- k_ 8y ago
  Yeah. I get that all the time with vivaldi address bar and it's driving me insane =/ Edit: and I have disabled both frequently visited pages and search there, but it still manages to reorder things after a couple seconds
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  Oh yes, I can relate to that - iOS system search is always pulling the rug on me and making me click random apps / web search results. This can be solved by clearly indicating that new results are loading, or deactivating the current items.
- m463 8y ago
  speaking of slow autocomplete - there is one mac app (omnifocus) I use where autocomplete will become busy and beachball after a few characters and it does this every time. Do not block autocomplete, especially when you're just starting to type. I would be good with having a delay before autocomplete kicks in rather than that.
0xffff2 8y ago
>This is countered by a few other of his own rules, such as 'prefix matches come first', 'exact matches come first'. Again, in some applications the best behaviour might be sorting by distance, recent use, relevance, popularity, ratings. Sorting is entirely domain-specific. I read the list as being ordered by priority. Each of the items above "should be sorted alphabetically" defines a group, and within each group items should be sorted alphabetically.

jakobegger 8y ago

>> If an option is highlighted, never change it, even if new data is loaded >I don't get this one. If I have the second item selected, and search for a completely new term, should the item remain wedged in the new results at the same position? I think the author means "never change it without user input". The problem is that Autocomplete is often slow, so developers load suggestions asynchronously, and may update suggestions shown to the user after better suggestions have been loaded. If a suggestion was already highlighted at that point, the system should not change it, to avoid the case where the user tries to commit a suggestion, but the system changes it just before the user hits the key to commit the suggestion.

k_ 8y ago
Yeah. I get that all the time with vivaldi address bar and it's driving me insane =/ Edit: and I have disabled both frequently visited pages and search there, but it still manages to reorder things after a couple seconds
ricardobeat 8y ago
Oh yes, I can relate to that - iOS system search is always pulling the rug on me and making me click random apps / web search results. This can be solved by clearly indicating that new results are loading, or deactivating the current items.
m463 8y ago
speaking of slow autocomplete - there is one mac app (omnifocus) I use where autocomplete will become busy and beachball after a few characters and it does this every time. Do not block autocomplete, especially when you're just starting to type. I would be good with having a delay before autocomplete kicks in rather than that.

0xffff2 8y ago

>This is countered by a few other of his own rules, such as 'prefix matches come first', 'exact matches come first'. Again, in some applications the best behaviour might be sorting by distance, recent use, relevance, popularity, ratings. Sorting is entirely domain-specific. I read the list as being ordered by priority. Each of the items above "should be sorted alphabetically" defines a group, and within each group items should be sorted alphabetically.