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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

For the sake of discussion, downsides:

A) Added overhead to the backend

B) UX - if you some filters but not the one(s) I want or need, then I'll get frustrated. No filters at all won't set me up for that. For example, eBay's filters are good for some types of products but not others.

C) A and B combined. I've noticed that some filtering UX - Home Depot, I believe is an example - will update the count of the # of products matching your filters. Check a box...wait. Check another box...wait. Fat finger the wrong box...wait...uncheck...wait.

I'm not saying these are reasons to not use filters, only pointing out some friction.

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Filters are also slow as fuck because they almost always need to apply before you can go on. So you are on a results page, you want 4-5 starts with attributes x and y, that’s not just 4 clicks that’s 4 clicks and waiting for the entire thing to reload every time before you can continue.

An other issue more intrinsic to filters is their inconsistency: because only applicable filters are shown entire categories can be missing and you need to hunt through every time.

But that is just bad programming and not something inheritently wrong with filters.

Neither are half the complaints in TFA inherent to the “advanced search paradigm”.

And this issue is extremely common IME.

If you make users click a Go button, they won't notice it, and get frustrated.

It's one of very few times I'll allow an animation. If the go button has been available but not clicked for some seconds, it will call attention to itself. I hate that but the only users who see it are the confused ones who need it. (Hopefully.)

Yes and no. If you wait to indicate # of results from filter choices you run the risk of the user "drilling down" to zero.

That is...pick...pick...pick...Go.."No results for your filters". That's not fun either.

I find I use filters - again Home Depot is a good example of bad - because the search is too loose. I'll enter a brand in the search term and have to use filters to pick only the brand I want to see.

The search should first try to answer the users search, not dump more possible products in the customers' face hoping the buy sonething.

Our solution for this was to put something like a 5-second debounce on automatically updating, but skip the delay and update immediately if the mouse moves outside of the filter area.

Sounds like a use case for frames?

I'll add that eBay's search is really good if you know how to use it. By use it I mean encapsulating every important phrase that you want to include or exclude within parenthesis and using commas as "or" statements within the parenthesis, such that "(phrase 1) -(phrase 2, phrase 3)" will return results for phrase 1 and exclude any listings that contain phrase 2 or phrase 3. It also pays attention to spacing so that only exact matches are returned.

I'll try that. But I find that when say, adidas has sales on eBay is a very time consuming experience.

Funny, I was just experiencing the exact same thing with Home Depot in another tab. Left in frustration for a HN break and saw this!

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