The disconnect between the development team and the user population is readily apparent with the move of the search bar to the title bar in office apps. The title bar was just that…the title bar; cramming more into that area makes navigating multiple windows that much more frustrating. It breaks the idea of a title bar. It is lazy coding to just stick it there because of “well, space…yeah.”
If there was any user acceptance work performed, the decision taken strongly suggest a review of the targeted population used and gaining understanding of the motivation for implementing a slower, less intuitive, and obstructive change. It seems that the test group was selected from those that had skin in the game in protecting their respective developer/engineering positions. Why should there be a change from what worked well and was effective for the user to this tragedy in implementation. A general search across all objects, data, and system indexes within an office application is an irrational approach for searching within application specific data. If the goal was to have a unified index of all items installed and saved for the user, mission kind of accomplished; the search results are inconsistent and incomplete. Additional, things that used to be accomplished in two or three clicks now take five or more non-intuitive clicks (and do not produce accurate or consistent results).
This type of change does not add value, wrecks the user experience, and demonstrates what continues to drive exploration into alternatives. Most of us probably appreciate sensible change that lead to improvement. Calling a change innovative does not automatically imply that this was a good idea. Valid statistics about user experience is meaningful where a simple count of usage as a statistic is really meaningless when there is no other choice.
Solutions: Return the search feature for in application data searches for the application. Provide simple interface to include or exclude application specific indexes in the general system index. Keep the title bar as the title bar.
