Search overhaul
Current issues
Search in Funkwhale is currently a suboptimal experience on desktop, and not really reliable on mobile.
The functionality appears twice in the sidebar:
- once in the form of a search bar, providing a few results while typing
- once in the form of a menu item, leading to the /search page
Issues with quick results from the sidebar:
- distinguishing between kind of items (artists, albums, etc) requires effort to parse the table of results
- picking one artist from one's own private library leads to Explore/artists, rather than My library/Artists
Issues with the search page:
- it has an excessively large search field
- it shows 8 empty tabs, each one with its placeholder, not really useful
- after a query, tabs with actual results are drawn within tabs with 0 items
- there are too many tabs, so entire results sets will never be seen on narrower screens
Even though this page focuses on the /search page, it is worth noting that:
- artists / albums / playlists / radios / podcasts pages have their own "search" fields, with their own issues
- remote libraries offer a search field
- there is no convenient way to search for content in personal libraries only
Design goals
-
adapt to different screen sizes -
offer useful options to set different scopes -
remove the duplicate entries from the navbar (as part of #1467) -
turn the search page into something useful, or drop it -
consider the search page as a good entry point to explore by tags #1488 -
add results to playlists #1259 -
play radios from results #1563 (closed) -
save radios