Persistent Search Bar

BiomedEngineer
BiomedEngineer
Community Member
edited May 2013 in iOS

Can you put a persistant search bar in every Favorites/Categories/Folders screens of the iOS app?

When I enter my master pass, I am presented with the Favorites menu, but to get access to the search bar, I have to tap Categories -> All Items, then tap again to enter search mode, which is convoluted for an important feature.

If you feel the search bar takes up too much screen space, consider Dropbox's approach, where the search bar is hidden until you pull down to reveal it. I still think an immediately available search bar is better though. It should also search universally, even when the search bar is in the Favorites screen. Thanks.

Comments

  • Hi @BiomedEngineer,

    It's not that it is taking too much space, that's not our concern. Right now, it's being able to filter the search without making it a bit more confusing. How do you switch from Global search to a narrowed search? There are many ways to do this but we want the simplest one. We are investigating and see if we can come up with a better persistent search feature for 1Password 4 but I don't have a timeframe on when we'll see this.

    Also, we don't think a hidden search bar helps. We tried this before in 1Password 3 and it turns out folks didn't even know there was search bar in the first place, so we're not going to do that.

    Thanks for bringing this up, hopefully, we'll come up with an idea.

  • BiomedEngineer
    BiomedEngineer
    Community Member

    Thanks MikeT. Some suggestions:

    Tapping on Categories button automatically show all items (instead of having to tap All Items). But the categories such as Logins, Secure Notes, etc are displayed at the top. Then a prominent separator denotes the separation between categories and the list of all items. On that same screen, the search bar at the top will search all records.

    I don't claim this is good from a usability standpoint; I'm sure some people will be confused at the first few tries, but it should quickly become obvious after a few uses. And if it's too confusing, maybe rename the Categories button to "All Items," with Categories being a type of organization method listed under All Items.

    But from the standpoint of convenience, I dread having to tap so many times just to find an entry I want by name. I think that most people will have hundreds of password entries, so very few would actually scroll to get to their desired entry, and most would opt to search. But the current search implementation on the iPhone version hides this feature under too many taps.

    Some further points on Categories: the current user experience of organizing data by Category gives each type of category equal weight. But I would think most people access Logins much, much more often than credit cards, social security, etc. By not favoring Logins (other than listing it at the top), my password gets buried. I know I could use Favorites, but I also don't want to add every item I use with medium frequency to Favorites and go against its intent, since that would make me scroll too much in the Favorites menu. Thanks for hearing out my suggestion.

  • Hi @BiomedEngineer,

    I'll share your suggestions with the team, no promises but we do know how useful this can be.

    Thanks!

  • LCBlue
    LCBlue
    Community Member

    +1 for this feature request. Anything we can do to be able to quickly search for items is appreciated. It just generally feels like too many tabs to get to the search function (1st world problem, i know . . .). Perhaps consider filtering the results after the search. In other words, have the search find all items by default and then just separate the search results by category. Kind of like how spotlight on iOS works (I think this is what my have been suggested by OP, but not sure).

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni
    edited May 2013

    Personally, I agree. It would be nice to have a search bar available as soon as I launch the app. That is how I use the app, but I know there are many other use cases. I'm advocating for this on your behalf (and mine). :)

  • hazmat
    hazmat
    Community Member

    A very late +1. I have been wanting this from my first use of 1P4, very badly.

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni

    Vote added. Thanks, @hazmat!

This discussion has been closed.