The little things really do count
Ever since I saw Joe Walnes demonstrate it, every project that I find myself on which has a search requirement, it is never long before I am trying to convince the team that a “find as you type” search mechanism is the way to go. Usually everyone is in agreement, but occaisionally stakeholders try and de-scope it saying it is low priority “gold plating”.
Now look at the way that google finance and yahoo finance handle their stock ticker search. Over time, tell me which one you would prefer to use? Tell me that the Google search is just “gold plating”.
It gets worse for Yahoo; they treat tickers and stock names seperately, requiring different searches. As The Stawart states “the fact that Yahoo has its ticker search and its name search in separate boxes, after all this time, seems downright negligent.“
I bet a few years ago I also would have called it low priority gold plating, but then I got used to using it. In my case, it was Firefox’s ctrl-f functionality that got me hooked. It’s great because of the find-as-you-type feature, but is also brilliant because no pop-up box comes up to get in my way.