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I'm looking for the right pattern to support 'asking' more questions to our site community from the main search component, I'm looking for a way to combine the main search functionality which involves autocompleting to also have a way for the user to ask and then take his question and present it to him in the 'add a question' page automatically, are there any sites that combines search and ask CTAs on the same main search component? any conventions for that? I thought of adding a toggle on the right of the search area, one will be 'search' and the other will be 'ask' but then I won't have a place for the actual CTA of performing the search, I could assume that people will hit the return for it but I'll still need to have an action button.I'll be happy to learn from your suggestions. thanks.

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  • Are people searching for answers to previously asked questions and then creating their own question if they don't find it? Much like this site...
    – DarrylGodden
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 12:55
  • Right now they're only searching for projects, you can take a look here: www.hometalk.com but we want them also to add questions of their own, so naturally we will give them an autocomplete to the actual question search but if nothing is found we want them to know that they can take their query and add it as a question for the community, and this is a big challenge that we don't really know how to tackle UX wise.
    – Guy Cohen
    Commented Aug 10, 2017 at 6:03

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What if the user does not to have to decide if it is a search or a question. The user only wants an answer. This would mean:

  • Hint text in search field "search or ask question"
  • on enter (or click on CTA search) always start a search
  • Show search result AND show a CTA like "want to ask the community?" which opens the "add question" page with search term as question.

a site that has something like this is feedback.techsmith.com but they hide the "ask a question" CTA in search result at the bottom of the page so it can easily been overseen by the user.

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  • Thank you for your answer, this is definitely one of the solutions, probably less confusing than adding a toggle, I'm adding an image for our planned solution, although I feel there's a better option. here it is: dropbox.com/s/apfqnzczz7ccxip/…
    – Guy Cohen
    Commented Aug 10, 2017 at 5:59

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