Oct 25, 2024

A feature I’d love in almost all the applications I use is Search Mode.

What’s Search Mode? It’s what I’m calling knowledge workers do when they forage for information.

My pain point is that most information systems distract me too easily. If I’m doing a task like booking a flight to Japan, and I want to see which airport is closer to my hotel, I don’t want my email to bombard me with things other than my hotel booking. It takes 23 minutes to recover from a distraction.

I imagine Search Mode to be a setting that users can set on their applications. This way, users dictate how they’d like to use their apps. If you’re in the business of getting a task done, then you’d turn on Search Mode. Every app you deal with becomes a search bar. If you need to message someone, you won’t see on the sidebar 10 other chats for you to worry about in the background– you simply type who you want to reach out to, and then the application brings that and only that up.

Search Mode would also be deliberately dumb. One thing I dislike about google search is the auto-complete feature. In fact, I dislike that many applications are now supposedly leveraging AI, but they’re basically just plugging auto-completes everywhere. Nothing can be more distracting when you’re in a focused mode!

Of course, you’d still need to tend to your information systems in what I’ll call Survey Mode. This is stuff like processing your inbox, responding to text messages in large group chats. [1] My complaint is that most apps are great at UIs for Survey Mode– getting a lay of the land for everything– but lacking in ways to enhance people’s focus.

We live in a world with more information than ever. It is on us to find ways to navigate this complexity so we can get things done.

Footnotes

[1] Inbox ten was a good read about this.