Search UX issue

[OfficialCRUGG]

Description of the bug

Not a bug per se, but a UX issue (and there wasn't any other fitting category when creating the issue): When on the page of a library and using the search, the search by default searches only movies, instead of the category.

Steps to reproduce

Go onto a Library > Search

Expected behavior

The search should only search that specific library. Or at the very least it should inherit the type of the library and e.g. search for Shows when in a Show Library. But really, the first is the expected behavior here.

Logs

No response

Screenshots

No response

Platform

Linux

Browser

Firefox

Jellyfin server version

10.8.13

Additional context

No response

[ferferga]

Can go deeper in your reasoning of why that should be the behaviour? In fact, in current web it works this way and I recall it created confusion in the past for users.

I don't know any search functionality in any service that searches based on context (unless there's another search input form just for that specific context). For example, Spotify has a search input per playlist/album, but searching on the top search bar will always perform a normal search in all the service.

[OfficialCRUGG]

I'll try my best. Most of my UX knowledge comes from intuition and pattern recognition, so I'm not always perfect at explaining things.

Firstly, a global search makes sense, I get that. The behavior of this being movies by default doesn't. If you want a global search, it should (a) either show results of any type of by default, or be set to the type of the category I'm currently on.

But as I said, I believe that some users may not interpret this as a global search bar, but as a "local" one. I'd say what behavior is expected from a search is dependent on whether or not the user thinks the search bar is part of the "shell" (like the sidebar is) or part of the individual page (like e.g. the list of media you have) The "top bar" which also has the search, currently has several things related to the current page, like filtering, amount of media, shuffle/play buttons, etc. This is all data related to the current page, so the user interprets the entire top bar as being related to the current page.

If you want to make this 100% intuitive and clear that this is a global search bar, you could visually seperate the bottom half of the top bar, as shown in this very rough mockup

I'm not really good at explaining these things, so I hope it's somehow understandable. And yes, this is a very minor thing, but I still think that the small things like these make a difference, even if not directly apparent.

Besides this, I still think the option of a per-category search would be great, perhaps through a search icon left of the shuffle button?

[erikbucik]

We discussed this issue; will probably split the search bar into two (global & local) when we redesign the content filtering component.