I posted before about the magic search+location entry I’m working on for Yelp. The general goal is to reduce Yelp’s interface to the smallest number of elements possible. The drop-down is very terse, though, and doesn’t give you a lot of information.
One of the things I really like about Mallard guide pages is that they present topics to you with more verbose text descriptions. This allows readers to scan titles quickly, while still letting them check the description for assurance before committing to a click. I wanted to bring that to the location dropdown.
Another problem is that the search entries in the dropdown gave no indication of where they’re searching. For 3.0, we want to have searches be per-document by default, with a link to search the entire help system instead. This would give you two entries in your history that look exactly alike, but return different search results.
So I played around with using two-line entries in the drop-down. For normal page entries, this is the same title and description you would see if it were on a guide page. For search entries, you see the search terms and where it’s searching.
Obligatory screenshot:
