Quote from: Andrew Heard on May 18, 2023, 12:51:53More thoughts bubble to the surface after a sleep... a better example, maybe - online search for "bar" (I'm in Dingle, Ireland, so plentiful POI). I don't yet tap the Find button. 1st item is "bar, pub - category" - good. The 2nd item is city of Barcelona - really? Maybe 2000km away. The 3rd item is "McCarthys Bar" 1km away - good. Now on 2nd test of same sequence Barcelona is 1st item.The idea how to find a nearby bar is like this: Type "bar", "pub". Something like "Public service", "Bar, pub" is suggested. These are bars like category of places, whatever name they have. Then if you tap Bar, pub (category), the first item actually suggested, you will see some. No need to use "Find" at all for nearby bars. Not all of bars will pop up necessarily, because in many cases there would be no map, just icons. If you pan or zoom, more bars come and go. If there are many of them, close to each other, only a few are visible. If this does not work in Dingle, then the server must be down or something drastic must be happening.
This time I tap the Find button - "Paudies Bar" is maybe 800m way - good, but 2nd & 3rd list items are places in France with "bar" in their name eg. "19800 Bar, France" - bad, and"McCarthys bar" is lost. I now tap SEARCH THIS AREA - only 1 more local bar icon is shown, whereas there are dozens.
When tested with a phone there are only a few search results, but when tested with a tablet there are many more results.
When compared to LoPoints(offline) with a Locus map there are 20+ bars within 500m.
1) should it even be necessary to tap Find? Just populate list after a pause in typing?
2) should it even be necessary to have a SEARCH THIS AREA button? Wouldn't most common search to be of visible map? When results are empty or scrolled to end of list, maybe the last item is "search wider area"?
3) I think @tapio suggested showing distance to each list item.
4) hover over any Search icon could display a popup or scroll the list otherwise it's not obvious which icon is which.
5) I think it is bad to zoom out (at all) to show icons in the list until one is even tapped, or at least restore original zoom/ position if Back button is pressed.
I hope this is constructive, and not just a rant.
Problems, or maybe problems:
- Nobody tells you "zoom in to see them all" (Like Gmaps tells you)
- Which bar is better, more important, thus visible first or recommended first place?: The Small Bridge or The Dingle Pub? We don't know yet and it is very difficult to answer this for the world wide data.
- Sometimes only one icon is seen when there is a large cluster of places. Zoom in to see them all.
IMHO this approach makes sense. It has confusing aspects (mostly because we don't know what is important in the real world, and some ordering is virtually random), but it works and is not that pathetic.
The same way this category based search works for waterfalls, shelters, glaciers e.t.c
1) unless there is some server problem, this is happening.
A note about ordering: Order by distance exclusively is not used. There is a lot of work to do, but I don't think Barcelona for "Bar" is that irrelevant.
