Comment 10 for bug 924923

Hi Christian,

you say : "I wonder how much the use case where the user filters the results, leaving the Dash home after having input the search query, should be prioritized."
well, to me this means: "lenses are useless".

currently the only _truly_ lens-related feature is the "available in the store" list (which is present in the applications and music lenses only). this can be an interesting feature in terms of "discoverability" and "upselling", but does it add that much value to the search?

now consider my concept.
the idea of a home lens which displays only recent content is more in the spirit of "a place where you can quickly search things that you know already you can easily access".

this said, your comment points out what i consider to be a significant bug in the dash: the lack of search persistence across the lenses. when you hit the super key and then start typing, if you hit tab or click an icon to switch to another lens, the search box turns empty.

i guess this behaviour was implemented to let the user perform multiple searches in different lenses, but, based on my experience, this scenario is higly unlikely. as a user i expect the lenes to behave as filters and not as "tabs".

you might argue that once you know about this behaviour, you will want to pick the appropriate lens before typing.
but forcing the user to do so is clearly an "affordance" issue: if the first thing i see is a search box, i expect this search box to be the "leading" feature. i would never expect that something placed at the very bottom of the dash actually controls the behaviour of something that is placed at its top.

enabling search persistence across lenses could solve this issue, like in the following use case:

user hits super key -> dash opens -> user types "ink" -> user notices no results in "recent apps" (eg. recent = last 10 days) ->user hits tab to switch to the applications lens -> user sees inkscape icon -> user hits enter to launch inkscape

ps. sorry for the *long* post :)