This might seem obvious to most but Iāve see this done numerous times by my clients during training sessions when we discuss using the Search bar.
Many users type something in the search bar and immediately hit the Enter key to get to see the results, as if they were using a search engine like Google, because that is what we intuitively do, right?
But there is a clear difference when you use the search bar in Asana:
So for example, if I am searching for āproductā and Iām looking for a Team or Portfolio or a Goal and I hit the Enter key I will be limited to results in the following categories: Tasks, Messages, Projects, Tasks in Templates
However, if I donāt hit Enter after I type āproductā I can see all the below results (beyond Tasks and Projects) such as: People, Templates, Portfolios, Messages, Goals, Project Briefs, Teams & Tags.
Rather than trying to re-train our brains on the specifics of how Asana search works, it would be best to update the search to match our mental models of having all search result types on both the type-ahead results and search results page.
I appreciate that you feel that way, but Iām not so sure I agree, and maybe others are split too.
To me, autocomplete and full search with results page are two different functions, and I actually believe making them the same will degrade the experience for at least one of these use cases, potentially both!
So Iām afraid Iād not vote for that suggestion, but do feel free to post it in Product Feedback if youād like.
Heatherās post doesnāt ask that the two features be made the same. Indeed, searching titles vs. searching all fields is a very significant difference in functionality, and is a welcome distinction between the āat a glanceā style of basic search and the full page experience of full text search. However, it is quite reasonable to expect that all searchable categories appear on the full text search page, and including them would in no way degrade the experience of either type of search. It would be an enhancement to full text search. Basic search would remain useful for its speediness.
As a final comment, even if this change did make basic search obsolete, so what? It does not make sense to withhold an enhancement to a useful feature because it may make another feature obsolete. If improving full text search did in fact make basic search obsolete (in the sense that users were observably abandoning it, something I do not think would actually happen), then thatās a big win for Asana! In that case you would not have to maintain two search features, only one!
We might each be interpreting Heatherās post (āā¦ update the search ā¦ā; which search?) a little differently, so apologies if I misunderstood. And we donāt know for sure, but Iād bet that Asanaās designers might consider that adding the extra functionality to the Advanced Search dialog could degrade its usability, even if it added extra functionality.
Re making basic search obsolete: Just to be clear, I havenāt raised this notion and am not sure how basic search would ever become obsolete because autocomplete is more immediate and efficient than opening a new dialog.
100% with that - it almost goes against every other search function to NOT hit enter, even if enter does nothing. Is there a solid reason to explain why both actions perform that different?
Update on this - I believe this is no longer necessary! I did some testing in my production environment, and it appears that partial search terms are now supported in advanced search (i.e., the full search results)!
@Stephen_Li, are you sure of this? I attempted to find a known Task using a partial word match (my team uses a lot of conventions that are not full words), and was let down.
@Wilson_Impson - replied to you in another thread, but for reference for others:
Asana recently (past few months) launched enhancements to search syntax, which are documented here:
There are still some limitations (e.g., it would not return results buried in the middle of a word, so if you search carrots, it wonāt find that in peascarrotspotatoes), but it does work if your term is the start of a word (i.e., in that previous example, peas* would have returned the result.
@Stephen_Li, this was very helpful. My failed search term was, luckily, at the beginning of a word, so using the ā*ā operator returned the results I was looking for!
When you type and hit the Enter key:
Read more about āFull text searchā in the Asana guide
When you type and DONāT hit the Enter key:
and donāt forget to use Ctrl+K (or Cmd+Kon Mac) to start typing directly in the search bar!
See all of my top tips & tricks on my website.
