Find what you’re looking for with the new search bar

A good search bar is an incredibly powerful thing. It acts as the main instrument to navigate to all your data and it sets the tone for how much time you spend looking for something. As a result, the search bar of a software tool, platform or website is often one of the most used elements.

To ensure you can retrieve information in Teamleader Focus as easily as you do elsewhere, we decided to give our search bar some significant performance, accuracy and design improvements.

When you think about what makes a good search, the topics speed and accuracy immediately spring to mind. Getting the right results in just a matter of milliseconds is a very valid thing to expect from a search bar.

To deliver upon that expectation, we built a completely new search within Teamleader Focus that is based on Elasticsearch.

Key to remember is that thanks to Elasticsearch, the Teamleader Focus search bar became much more performant and accurate. It required some heavy lifting from our engineering team to implement the technology, but they gladly did so because it opened the door to numerous other improvements as well:

• Rank relevant results higher: Our search bar applies a relevancy score to decide how high a specific result should rank. It ranks, for example, matches with a contact or company higher than other ones.

• Cope with typos in searches: Typos can happen. But they won’t make or break your search. Our search bar will always return results that come close to your entry and rank them accordingly.

• Support fuzzy and incomplete searches: Sometimes you only vaguely remember the name of the thing you’re looking for. Based on your best input, or a so-called fuzzy search, our search bar will take an educated guess and return possible results.

• Handle special characters: Nothing as frustrating as getting no results because you didn’t use an é, ï, à, etc. Our search bar is, of course, capable of processing those. But as mentioned above, forgetting them isn’t a problem either.

Performance and accuracy are one thing. Equally important for a good search experience is how the whole interaction feels. This might sound a bit fluffy, but you’ll immediately get what we mean once we take a closer look at what changed.

First of all, we aligned the general style of the new search bar with the rest of Teamleader Focus to further bring consistency and familiarity across our platform. Those of you with a keen eye would have noticed we’re doing this with every new update we roll out.

When it comes to the design and characteristics of the search bar itself, there are a few things that benefit that earlier-mentioned feel:

• Clear and recognisable icons: Whether the thing you’re looking for is a contact, company, invoice or project, by having a dedicated icon for each category, you can see what’s what at a glance.

• Tabs per category: If you already know what you’re looking for, you can filter out a specific category by using the tabs. Note that only the categories that return results will be shown.

• Highlighting of results: To give you an idea why a specific result is being returned, the search bar will always highlight in bold why it sees something as a match.

• Returning extra information: If you’re looking for an invoice, chances are high you actually want to check the amount or status of that invoice. That’s why the search bar will also show extra information, or so-called metadata, together with the results.

• Sorting options: Sometimes you don’t need to see your search results ranked on relevancy. No problem at all. You also have the option to sort results on newest, oldest or alphabetically.

It’s quite clear that when it comes to performance, accuracy and design, the search bar in Teamleader Focus changed for the better. On top of that, building it on a new technology opened up the path to investigate even more improvements such as recently searched or visited pages.

What to know more about what fields are searchable in Teamleader Focus? Read everything about it in our support centre. Not a Teamleader Focus user but eager to try out our search? Try it out for free for 14 days.