Summary

Search relevance is an area that is often mentioned when improvements to the search and discovery experience are considered. While CMR controls the actual relevancy algorithm, there are things that can be changed within the UI that help improve the search experience as it relates to relevancy. In particular, with a few modifications to CMR's search response, EDSC could allow users to group search results be a given value or characteristic. We could group versions of collections together, we could group by provider or we could group by instrument so that search results take up less space in the results area. We would of course allow users to expand the grouping should they choose.

The scope of this work would be to design a UI that lets users choose how they want to group, how the grouping would look in a search results list, and how an expanded groupset would look. Additionally, assuming the CMR functionality is in place, we would implement the actual result grouping functionality.

Benefits

The main benefit of this work is to provide logical grouping options so that the cognitive load on users is reduced and there are less results to sift through.

Approach

The high level plan would be to work up a set of interactive wireframes that would show design updates to search results and how those updates improve usability. Once those interactive wireframes are approved, we would be able to move forward with implementation of search result grouping.

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