TaleSpire Dev Log 496

Hey,

I've now firmly arrived at the last 10% that (at least feels like) takes 90% of the time regarding search. But first, let's cover the 90% that are done:

• TaleWeaver: Our internal version of TaleWeaver now has all the new tag stuff integrated, meaning we can actually use it for our own assets. I'm happy to report that my efforts to make the tagging code portable worked out well and TaleWeaver integration was quite painless. There are some remaining UX and quality-of-life changes, but nothing major.
• TaleWeaverLite: There's not been a ton of progress there because, well, it was mostly done by the time of my previous log already. I do have to backport some changes made to the tagging code for our internal TW to TWL and I have a decently sized todo list of bug fixes and minor improvements that you lot reported to us that I'd like to get done as well.
• TaleSpire: During some testing sessions of the new search logic, we managed to find and fix a bunch of bugs in various edge cases, and search now feels quite good. We've also done a pass over the UI and concluded that the basics are quite solid, but there are a few areas that need improvement, as well as some fun UI breakages that need fixing.

In TaleWeaver and TaleWeaverLite pretty much everything that's left is bug fixing and thorough testing. The TaleSpire code is also functional, but equally requires testing and bug fixing. The remaining interesting part before we can ship all this, is making the UI more intuitive:
One of the main goals of the new tag and search system was that you shouldn't need to learn how we made the system, it should be intuitive and self explanatory enough on its own and the current UI iteration just isn't. During testing, we found that when just entering text, it was not at all clear what was actually happening. For the library, the search is completely "live" - any character you type will immediately update the search results. That is really nice from a usability standpoint, but the UI never tells the user what it is actually searching. Sure, we, and people who have been following the devlog, know that it is searching the asset names, but the UI isn't telling you that, and since we currently don't expose the asset names, there's no (easy) way for a user to make that mental connection.
In a similar vein, while our tag synonym system is really powerful, it is also unique to TaleSpire and we're not doing a good enough job yet of making the UI tell you what's going on with that. Especially for features and systems that exist nowhere else^[0], it is on us to make sure you all actually understand how they work and how to use them, so we need to make the UI a bit more explicit about what is happening and why.

Well, I think that's mostly it! As you can see, we're mostly in the "polish and get it ready" phase, which I am incredibly happy about. However, the remaining UI changes make it hard to estimate the remaining time. Often times code is easy because at one point you can go "the feature I speced out is now done and works according to specification"^[1], while UI design can be more of an art where it's never really "done" and there could always be "yet another round of iterations to make it even better".

[0]: I'm sure there's some other software that has a similar system, but the point still stands - it's not widespread and as such the "average" person does not have intuition about how such a system behaves.

[1]: Of course it often isn't quite that simple

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team