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.

Most information systems distract me. If I’m doing booking a flight to Japan, and I want to see which airport is closer to my hotel, I don’t want to open my email and be bombarded 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 becomes a search bar. If you’re on a messaging app, you won’t see 10 other chats fighting for your attention– you simply type who you want to reach out to, and then the application brings up only that chat.

Search Mode would be deliberately dumb with autocompletes. In the above example, the app would only display matching search results only after you hit enter. I think autocompletes are useful only if P(user uses recommendation | you show recommendation is pretty high. Otherwise, it becomes google search where when I type “home d” to search for home depot, I get “home decoration”, “home design”, “home dental clinic”. I think the cost of seeing this junk outweighs the one and a half seconds to type out 3 characters.

Of course, you’ll 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. After all, attention is all you need.

Footnotes

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