SL's Sleek New Search UI Receives Mixed Reader Response

Some like the new search UI... but some not so much. Here's reader David D.'s take:

It feels good, but only Linden Lab will be able to tell whether it really helps or not. In my field of higher education, there is a want to make lots of pretty videos and web pages because people equate user experience with knowledge access and will help with developing competence. There are studies that say that the look and feel have nothing to do ultimately with the learning. Usability (and universal design), information results, and presentation are all different things, and while they *can* impact one another, you can have a crap design with all the right bits of info which people are just fine consuming, and you can have really pretty things that still have terrible text output. And, even if you have both, if the engine doesn't let people get what they want, it can be as advanced and clean as it wants; it is still a crappy search engine.

The UX is good and is more attractive. Now put some substance behind the change and you'll have good universal design.

 Responding to my comment that it looks prettier, longtime third party viewer developer Henri Beauchamp demurs:

I beg to differ: I hate the flat look, the huge fonts, the cumbersome results (that also glitch for the first result, when the window is made narrow enough; the input field then truncates the upper result), the fact that you need to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll again just to see the first few results, etc, etc...

But what bothers me most, as a viewer developer, is that the whole form is JavaScript-dependent and that the search URL it composes is not any more based on simple URL parameters substitutions, meaning that if you want to query the new SL search engine with a simple category/query terms couple, you cannot no more do it short of duplicating the JavaScript code used to compose the search URL...

I can't speak to the JavaScript points, but far as prettiness, it's why I noted that Google search became standard because it put relevant, really fast results over prettiness. As you can see from the video above, SL's search takes way longer than a typical Google search -- even though the former is only searching for content in a niche virtual world, while the latter is searching the entire Internet.

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