Spotlight for Drupal

Let's prototype how the UI for a global search functionality could work for Drupal on mobile devices.

Here's my thinking behind it (which was originally posted here)

Use Spotlight on my Macbook all the time to launch apps. I don’t even have to think about where the apps are or clicking on them I just type a few characters and hit enter.
I’ve seen a big trend towards auto-completion on mobile. User’s don’t want to type a whole word to see their results on a touch screen so the results are presented live as they type. iOS contains a global search also called Spotlight. Firefox mobile introduced the awesome screen to quickly present bookmarks and visited sites to the user.

Excerpt from The secret lives of links:

• If people don't see their trigger words, they click search.
• What do people type into the search box? Their trigger words. They are creating a link. If they don’t see a trigger word, they enter theirs into search.
• Your search logs are filled with trigger words. Have you looked there lately? Match the search phrases up with the pages users search from.

Spotlight for Drupal is the user’s get out of jail card. If they are lost or have misplaced something they can type what they are looking for in in a text field and results will be quickly returned. This can be:

• Nodes
• Users
• Modules
• Config pages
• Help pages
• Content creation forms
• Drush style commands
• Anything we want

This can also be a power tool for advanced users.

One other benefit, if we make spotlight searches part of Drupal’s anonymous report statistics we can get a very high level view of desire paths how the user thinks.