Should searching a table include hidden columns?

Question

I have a table accompanied by a search component. The table is filtering items upon typing according to the following rule:

• If at least one of the item properties contains the text at the search box - show the item.
• Otherwise - do not show the item.

Now, the table is allowing users to choose if a column is visible or not, so he can dismiss (hide) columns that he finds useless.

The question is, should the filter also take in account properties which their corresponding column is hidden?

Check the example below:

1. Search box is empty - all table items are shown.
2. Search box contains text - only items with relevant text are shown.

Now, when the Nickname column is hidden, should the table show the relevant item (4) or not (3)?

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Answer 1

Avoiding the dilemma

There's a possible solution without falling into this dilemma:
Give users the choice, just by adding a checkbox below the search/filter input which specifies "Search in hidden columns too" or some similar text.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

If for some reason that's not enough I'd choose 4 (show results even if the column is hidden).

Why?

• With option 3 users will eventually forget what column they have hidden and then when they search for something they won't get any result, which will bring them to think that person/registry is not part of their data. That can only derive in awful consequences.
• Visibility preferences are not by default the same as filtering/searching preferences. You can hide/show something for a reason and then search something specific with different reasons.
• With option 3 you are forcing the user to remember what they have filtered and to perform additional actions when they just want to search/filter some data. Thus, you are delegating your responsibility to the users, adding cognitive load and more work for users.

If you want to offer a more specific search it will help to:

• Add column filtering, thus the user will be able to search for a particular value of a visible column, leaving the top generic searching/filtering input to "search everywhere".

Answer 2

I choose (4) at first but after some careful analysis, I think (3) would fit your design better. The reason being that your search itself is already a filtering mechanism (keywords). It doesn't make sense to do further filtering on your results by hiding/showing relevant boxes. Also when I choose to hide a column, I am explicitly indicating that I'm not interested in whatever result that is shown in that particular column.

Just a suggestion, perhaps you could rearrange your design by putting the search on top of the show/hide box. Change the search label to "Search In.." so user has the options to search in one or more of the columns.

Example.. By default, all the boxes are checked, so the search should be performed in all the columns. If I uncheck all the boxes and only select "name", then the search should only be run on the "Name" column. This makes more sense to me.

Answer 3

So it boils down to whether the search is on the data or just the current view of the data?

I'd personally go for 4. Sometime columns are hidden just because of space restriction rather than lack of interest, though obviously the user tends to keep the columns they are most interested in, however as rewobs said often a user will forget what they can't see any more.

So option 4, but sort the returned results by whether the match was in a visible column or not. Thus you can split the results into two parts, the second perhaps being subtitled "you may also be interested in" and specify the field which caused the match for each result (this hinges on you getting that level of feedback from the search engine or being able to deduce it after the results are returned)

There's also the issue that the search seems set up for text fields only, how would you search for employee yes/no whether that column's visible or not, or what about an age (it would seem to be exact matches only, or typing '4' would return everyone who's 24,34,40-49,54,64, etc)

Answer 4

As adomsoh suggested the column is relevant to you as a user or it is not relevant. Hiding a column is saying "I don't care about this column". To then perform a search on it is inconsistent and confusing. Do you care about it or not?

It's confusing because there is nothing visually to correlate between your search query and your results. It can get even more confusing in cases where what you've searched for is found in visible columns for some rows and hidden columns in others (e.g. someone's name has "Peldi" in it and someone else's hidden nickname has "Peldi" in it). It will look like the search is broken. I've searched for "Peldi" and it's showing me rows that don't have Peldi in them.