Compendium: Search feedback

General Demiplane Feedback
1

New Demiplane user, but I was a D&D Beyond user for 5 years. I’m sad to see that the search experience that was so frustrating at DDB is largely the same here.

In the scenario where I need to look up how far a party can travel in a day, I know that will be defined in the core rulebook. If I go to the core rulebook, Chapter 9, exploration, I can find the section “Exploration Mode” and below that another section called “Travel Speed”.

My expected experience when searching for “travel speed” then, is that the first 1 or 2 search results would be related to that section. Instead the first search result for “travel speed” is the Detect Magic spell. See screenshot below. There needs to be some weighting to actual headers within the rules.

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It gets worse as there are 53 pages of results, and the first reference to the rules about travel speed is on the 4th page of results with a link to the Index of the Core Rulebook.

The search functionality is an important accessibility tool. I have ADHD, I forget things a lot, and having to slog through multiple pages of reults that have really nothing to do with my search while in the middle of a session is a recipe for disaster.

People with ADHD and/or on the Autistic spectrum can quite easily get overwhelmed by this kind of experience. I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous to people that don’t deal with either of those things, but it’s true, regardless.

Also, an option to only search books I own would be nice. Though as the number of books a game master owns grows, what we really need is to be able to specify the book to search in. If I’m looking for travel speed, I want to be able to scope the results to the book I know it’s in.

I know the devs are working hard to put together a great product, I just want to offer my experience to hopefully drive an improved user experience.

5 Likes
2

As a recent DDB transplant myself, I have found the search engine to return better results when I add more words. In an attempt to locate the information you were seeking I tried “travel speed per day” (without quotes) and the first result appears to be what you were looking for.

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1 Like
3

Thanks Nickolis, that certainly helps.

4

Thanks for posting and sharing the feedback!

This is the key callout here - we are in Early Access, and we have not touched the search experience since really its first iteration when the first EA build went live.

We fully acknowledged that A) search is nowhere close to where it needs to be, and B) search is an essential part of what we intend the platform to be when it fully launches. It’s simply further down the punch list right now and we haven’t gotten to it yet.

Having been there from the very start when that other toolset was created in my past life, I can confidently say that here we have taken search at the platform level in a different direction that will give us the power and flexibility to make it a great experience…when we get to the point where it can become our focus. Right now, we’re pushing to get character tools out into Open Beta, but polishing search is on the short list after that. We decided not to do anything with search until character tools are out because many of the things we need to do to with it will tie into a completed character experience.

We’ll keep everyone posted on when we get therre - thanks again!

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5

Completely understand that there are other features that are more pressing than this. It’s good to hear that search improvements are on the roadmap :slight_smile:

Thanks for taking the time to acknowledge the feedback and provide some insight.

1 Like