[Roadster] sidebar search results -- Please read/reply!

Ian McIntosh ian_mcintosh at linuxadvocate.org
Sun Feb 27 19:59:38 PST 2005


As you may have read in the meeting log, Nathan, Steven and I
semi-agreed that the sidebar search results should be mixed-- that is,
include roads, parks/lakes, cities, states, and POI (points of interest)
all in one list.

Each _type_ of result will have its own icon in the list, except for POI
which will use whatever icon it uses on the map itself.

The open question is how to display the results.  Right now they're in a
list with no meaningful order.  Some options:

We could sort by distance from the user's current location.

We could sort, but weight it by both distance and "size" (so in a search
for "boston", a super close Boston St. may outweigh the city, but
usually big things will be on top).

We could group results by category in the list (states then cities then
POI then roads?).  Perhaps with headers between them.

We could put results in a tree-view and put similar road segments (eg.
all "Smith Street" segments in a given city/state/zip) under a single
parent row (these can take up a lot of screen space[1]).

...or some combination of these.

I'd love to hear _everyone's_ opinion on this one.  It's a super
important part of the user experience. :)

-Ian

[1]
http://linuxadvocate.org/projects/roadster/images/roadster-0.2.2-2_large.png




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