Has anyone suggested moving the icon in the sidebar results from below the snippet near the "more from..." up to the left of the title? I find myself looking down to the icon to get the source so I know how to interpret the results. Also, it would make the cross-wiki results more distinct from the on-wiki results.
Topic on Talk:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/Design
We can certainly take a look at that too, thanks for the suggestion! :)
@TJones (WMF) This icon treatment has been considered (but there are arguments both ways). Semantically, there are two approaches to reading the cross-wiki results.
- This is a search result, and it's from project X.
- This is project X, and this is a search result from it.
Treatment 1 puts the focus on the content and 2 puts the focus on the project.
The scenario we have in mind when making this choice is that many people might not know about the sister projects, and these results are supposed to help discover them. Option 2 might help discovery by prominently declaring "this is a different project", but if someone doesn't know what that project is, the label probably isn't that helpful, and people usually don't click on things they don't understand. Option 1 intentionally makes cross-wiki results seems more like "regular" results, in order to lead people to evaluate them based on their content rather than the project they're from. The issue with this approach is that someone might misinterpret the result as coming from wikipedia, and then they'll be confused as to why the search result took them to another site. We should certainly avoid this confusion (and perhaps the current icon treatment is not obvious enough) but I still think it's beneficial to most people that we prioritize the content first instead of the projects.
I've updated the page to include the design with more prominent project titles to get a comparison of the two approaches.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/e/e5/Cross-wiki_results_with_prominent_project_titles.jpg
I was suggesting—but not describing well—something else that's sort of in between the two screenshots you have. I've hacked at one of your screenshots to make my own! It isn't pretty since I did it in an image editor rather than modifying the source, alas. Now that I've uploaded it, I don't really like the whitespace, but you get the idea.
My thought was to just have the icon for the project before the title of the page. That gives a quick visual hint as to what kind of info you are looking at. I would find that very useful, for example, on the link to "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants", which I didn't expect to be Wikiquote. Anyway, the icons are small and easy to ignore if you don't know what they are, but they give a clear indication of what you are looking at once you become familiar with them.
I've just realized that an implicit assumption I have based on the original screenshot is that we are only planning to show one result from each project. If that's the case, then I like my "prominent icon" idea best—though as always I defer to Jan's expertise. OTOH, if we are showing multiple results from sister projects, then I like Jan's "prominent project title" design better. I think the original sidebar design might make it even harder to figure out the source of the link if there are potentially multiple results from each project.
Thanks for taking feedback and doing the extra mockup based on my comment!
@TJones (WMF) I like your icon idea best too! It strikes a good balance between putting the content first and making it clear that the search result comes from a different project :)