@Hourences
Found another one. The documentation can not be searched reasonably. Here’s an example:
For the longest time I thought new documentation is simply missing function and property specifiers:
If I search for class specifiers, I get a result:
With property and function specifiers, however, no results:
Using just “specifiers” alone finds some more, but no function or property specifiers:
They are in fact there, but they are hidden extremely deeply in the documentation, under a category simply labeled “Properties” deep in the documentation tree:
Then I realized that the thing on the left is not a search, it’s just a category title filter:
BUT, in that case, how do I search the documentation?
The only other search button on the entire documentation page seems to be the top right one, but that one is utterly useless at finding anything.
Example - searching for “property specifiers”:
No relevant results found…
It finally works, when I explicitly check the “Documentation” checkbox, which is unchecked by default:
Of course as soon as I perform the next search directly from Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Unreal Engine 5.4 Documentation | Epic Developer Community the filters on the left are reset to default (all unchecked) and once again return irrelevant results:
So, in order for user searching the documentation to find what they need, they need to:
- Figure out what the right search box is
- Figure out that even the “right” search box doesn’t provide right result by default
- Manually change search filters to include Documentation
- Manually set up those filters to include Documentation after each search, because they get reset on each new search.
Here’s my proposal how to make searching on Unreal sites less painful:
- NUKE the Type filters on the search page. Kill it, remove it completely
- The top right search button should always search ONLY Forum when executed from the forum page, ONLY documentation when executed from the documentation page, ONLY Learning when executed from learning page, and ONLY Snippets when executed from Snippets page. Essentially, these category filters should be set implicitly, under the hood based on where the search was initiated from, rather than being exposed to users requiring them to manually set them up.
- It’s almost never the case user searching the forums wants to see documentation results, or user searching documentation wants to see forum posts. If they want to search both, it’s much easier to simply have two web browser tabs open side by side with forum and docs search results, than to have one search page which requires tedious, manual filter checkboxes setup just to see a messy kitchen sink of both types of results.
This combined search thing seems like something some random consultant though was a good idea, but no one with actual experience using Epic software/services ever wanted. I suspect a buzzword “Knowledge Base” was thrown around when the new Dev Community was being designed, but people in general hate those.
Knowledge bases aren’t a tool to help users, they are a maze to help large corporations make it much harder for end users whom have some problem to get in touch real tech support person, which usually costs the corporation much more. But since (paid UDN aside) you, the Epic do not provide any realtime human tech support, you don’t need Knowledge Base mazes to add friction to prevent users from getting the information they need.
