The DistilBio team has been working at improving the “autosuggest” to make querying easier and to display more relevant options to the user. Based on user feedback new features have been added to the autosuggest some of which are listed below.
As the user starts typing the search term a count for the number of entries available is displayed at the right of the search box. This allows the user to know the number of entries available and probably specify the search term to narrow it down what the user is looking for. The count appears for only the first search term and does not appear for subsequent search terms added.
The “type” of data eg: drug, disease, gene, connection, property etc now appears to the right of the drop-down box for easier readability.
Earlier the drop-down box displayed the first 5 entries for the search term. This has now been increased to 20 entries. The user can scroll down to find more relevant search terms. We are also looking at adding a “more” option in case more entries are available. This is a feature that will be added soon.
We are also working on displaying only actual connections available for a search term. Eg: Drug A has data available for 5 connections whereas Drug B has data available only for 3 connections. Currently all the possible connections for a drug are displayed for both A and B in the drop-down. We are looking at displaying only the entries that have data for the search term specified by the user. This ensures that the user is not faced with empty results, rather finds more relevant results that they are looking for.
Do try out the new features and we would love to hear your feedback!
