Better arranging (or adding results hierarchy) of mobile app search results
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Joe Yang
Please make the search results to show the matching record titles first, then comments, files etc. OR even better, make power search available on the mobile app!!!
When the search is used to look up a contact on the mobile app (over 30 thousand contacts) by our sales team on the road, they are having a hard time locating the actual contact record because it sorts the result the way the solution view is sorted.
On the web version it works exactly the way they like but the mobile version is very unfriendly for them. Kind of absurd that the mobile app in 2024 lacks such basic feature.
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Vova Chobotko
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Please let us know if you have any additional questions, we are happy to help
Jon Darbyshire
Thank you for posting, Joe Yang! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide more details on how you would like the power search to function on the mobile app?
- Are there any specific criteria your sales team uses most frequently when searching for contacts?
- Could you clarify what you mean by 'the way the solution view is sorted'? How would you prefer the search results to be sorted on the mobile app?
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Joe Yang
Jon Darbyshire Hi Jon, It's simple. If someone wants to look up a client by name in a solution, the result should first show matching records by names.
When a name is searched in a SS solution for contact management, the records with matching names should show up at the top - not all the other results that contain the word in the notes or other fields.
Currently this is how the mobile search works:
For example, a sales staff wants to look up a client with a first name Tom but couldn't recall how the last name was spelled. When the word 'Tom' is searched in the mobile app, it would return thousands of results that include the word 'Tom' in any of the fields such as notes since other words such as 'tomorrow' could be triggered by 'Tom'.
Then, the said results only appear how the solution is sorted. If a record of client whose name is, say, Adam Bolton has a note that contains the word 'tomorrow', Adam Bolton would show up at the top of the results followed by hundreds of other records where the names have nothing to do with 'Tom' but triggered by the search phrase due to matches in other fields such as notes, comments etc. The record that actually contain the word 'Tom' in the names would be near the bottom of the list.
Now I understand the example I provided is a hyperbole but it's not too far from what could happen when we have 30 thousand records in clients with a lot of detailed notes and other information tied to each of them.
If the search could simply organize the result based on the hierarchy of fields, it would make the most sense. If not, at least it should prioritize the primary field, then the rest.
Jon Darbyshire
Joe Yang Understood. We will work to quickly address this for you.
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Vova Chobotko
Joe Yang thank you for your feedback, I would like to share a few tips that might help with your request.
You are correct in saying that when you search inside a Solution we search not only by Title field, but also by some other field types.This might cause some matches that might not be exactly what you were looking for.
With the example that you provide, where sales people search for "Tom" we can advise that you simply put a space after the "Tom". That will cut down the number of search results and filter out words like "tomorrow". On mobile we do not trim the spaces at the end for exactly that reason so that you can use this as a feature exactly for use cases like yours. Please see screenshots attached as an example.
The reason why we do not organise results based on Title as a primary field is to preserve consistency throughout the product, to ensure that with the same search criteria we show the same list of records both on Web and Mobile in the same order. Sorting is preserved based on the view controls that you set up in the Table.
Also for convenience reasons we do filter out the results that do not match search criteria as opposed to the Web since there is much less screen space on mobile. That way you do not need to scroll through all 30 thousand contacts and can only focus on the ones that potentially match the search criteria.
Please use the space at the end of the search word to filter out the words that have the same stem and that should solve the use case of only finding the contact that you were looking for and remove unwanted results.
Hope this helps!