Make labels more convenient to enter (smart autocomplete/autosuggest)

[dennisjaheruddi]

Currently we use your software, and when users need to enter a label they can type the first few letters, and a suggestion is made based on tags that start with this.

However the problem I have is that for my site, many labels (for reasons outside my control) must start with a prefix. Nowadays several websites solve this kind of challenge by autosuggesting based on any fit, not just on the first few letters. I wondered if this was also possible in your platform and how.

Example:

I have a tag called Atlas hub

If a user types hub, there are no suggestions but it should suggest Atlas hub.

[JasonHill]

Hi @dennisjaheruddi,

Can you please clarify whether you are talking about tags or labels (they are different features in the platform). On the Workshop community that I manage, we only use pre-defined labels which form a second level of categorisation of posts. Rather than users having to type the labels, we allow users to pick them as if clicking a button.

Jason

[dennisjaheruddi]

Hello I am talking about predefined labels. There are quite a lot of labels so at any point you can only see less than half of them at the screen with a typical resolution.
So yes, users do end up clicking instead of typing as the autocomplete is very limited, but the typing experience should be improved.

[JasonHill]

@dennisjaheruddi 

If you are only using redefined labels, then I would recommend you hide the box for users to type in (using CSS) as it doesn't make a lot of sense to feature it if users can't add their own labels. You might want to consider culling some of your infrequently used labels to get the number down and consider turning your labels into buttons as we did. Have a look at Workshop for inspiration. I'll be keen to hear what you go with as I'm sure we could improve our labels system further. 

Jason

[CarolineS]

Such a good idea to hide the text entry box for labels (when using predefined labels only), @JasonHill ! Going to do that ASAP, and style my label-selection more nicely. Thanks for the inspiration!

[JasonHill]

No worries @CarolineS. Let me know when you've finished - I'd like to take a look at where you land.

Jason

[CarolineS]

Ah, I just played around with this, and sadly it's beyond my current abilities. It's easy enough to hide the label input box w/ CSS, but then there's no indication of what is selected (since, by default, the selections just show up in the input box). You've solved this problem beautifully on Workshop by turning each selected label red, but I can't figure out how to detect if a given label has been selected in order to change its styling (the class doesn't seem to change when it's selected?).

I do want to adjust this, but it seems I'll need a real developer. I'll add to the to-do-for-future-developer list! 

Cheers!

[dennisjaheruddi]

Unfortunately culling labels is not an option. Our company services many products and they must all be available. Also, half of the products start with the same prefix, which we cannot change (as we do not own the products) and cannot emit (for legal reasons).
Given that people would otherwise need to do scrolling, I do think that the ability to type is valuable.

That being said, the improvement should not be too complicated. I cannot look into the logic of the site, but suppose the current label matching is done with something like this regex:

[start of string][the text that you typed][any other characters]

Then simply changing this pattern to

[any other characters][the text that you typed][any other characters]

Would already be a pretty good fix, surely this is not too hard to make.

[AmyS]

@dennisjaheruddi 

Was just going to say - this has to do with how the search terms are being stemmed/wildcarded in that particular instance. I know there are reasons why this type of search is used in certain situations, but maybe there's some wiggle room I'm not aware of.

Could you possibly cross-post this into the Community Ideas board, so the product team can track it? https://community.khoros.com/t5/Khoros-Community-Ideas/idb-p/Lithium_Ideas

[dennisjaheruddi]

I don't seem to be able to access that, perhaps someone here could create the request (and link to it to and from here). 

Will also approach my IT team to see if I can figure out if anyone I know has the right permissions.