Filtering within facets

Question

I am working on a faceted filter placed vertically on the lefthand side. To accelerate searching for specific parameters within the facets, i implemented a search bar which hides all non-matching parameters within the facets.

I tested this on a small scale, and the results where bad:

• Users couldn't see new facets appearing if they selected a product group while a filter was active,
• Users complained that hiding all non-matching parameters interrupted their workflow, that they would like to have access to everything all the time.

To solve this, I wanted to make the search-bar highlight all matching results and have them float to the top.

this however is not ok with our style guide team, since no other filter bar in any of our apps behaves this way.

Is there a way around this? I am all right with ignoring the second finding, since my sample size was so small, but the first one is a really big problem. I also know that the whole concept of filtering within the facets is not something the users expected, so i might remove it entirely, but with the amount of parameters we have, this could be problematic.

Answer 1

If I understood right you have one search field for all parameters over all categories. This might be confusing. What a faceted filter should provide (if there are a lot of parameters) is a 'search' within the category. Means one search field per category. To keep it simple you could us a 'toolbar' per category. The tools could be select all, reset and search. Only if the user clicks on search the search field is provided. If you hide the search field or not depends on how often the search field is needed or used.

The search field should work as you described. Hide the non matching parameters. Make it easy to the user to delete the search term by providing an action to do so.

In the example below on category 2 the user has clicked on 'search'