A long-standing complaint about Top Hat was it's lack of a good search function for course content.

Expectations for search in this space were a bit different than what is usually expected. Rather than simply delivering top results, you need to show the results in order of appearance primarily.

I had initially seen this as an opportunity to build a universal search tool into the product via ⌘K, but it quickly became clear this was over-shooting scope and we'd be unable to deliver on the user expectations a menu like this has.

In the final build, we settled on a search that was organized around the left-hand navigation. This made it clear that what was being searched was only the content in this list.

Because the results are organized by folders/chapters and there can potentially be a lot of hits, I invested a lot of time in getting the right set of interactions for the accordions on each section.

As part of this, I added handy expand/collapse all buttons at the bottom of list.

Sometimes though, this chronological list could be frustrating to use as it can return a lot of "loose-fitting" results. After several iterations, I settled on a simple "exact matches" toggle that would essentially provide a more traditional search experience for when it was necessary.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Sue-Mun Huang who made the PM push to ship this feature. Additional thank you to Matt Watt who managed the final implementation.