Exercise 3: Why Search Beats Category Navigation in Settings — Possible Solution ==================================================================== WHY THIS CHAPTER RECOMMENDS SEARCH OVER CATEGORY NAVIGATION ------------------------------ Per this chapter's own tip-box, "the search bar at the top of the Settings app indexes every setting across every category, including many that are nested several pages deep," and "typing a keyword and pressing Enter is consistently faster than navigating category by category, especially for a setting whose exact home isn't obvious in advance." Category navigation requires already knowing, or correctly guessing, which of the several top-level categories (System, Apps, Personalization, Privacy & Security, and others this chapter tours) a given setting lives under - and, per this chapter's own tour, some settings sit several pages deep inside a category rather than on its main landing page. THE KIND OF SETTING THAT BENEFITS THE MOST ------------------------------ A deeply nested, non-obviously-categorized setting benefits the most from search. This chapter's own tour gives a real example: the Taskbar-personalization setting that moves centered icons back to the left-aligned position lives inside Personalization, several menu levels down from the category's own landing page - a plausible enough location, but not the only one a user might guess (System, given that it's taskbar behavior, is an equally reasonable first guess). Searching "taskbar" directly reaches that setting regardless of which category it happens to live under, without requiring the correct guess first. WHY THIS GENERALIZES BEYOND THAT ONE EXAMPLE ------------------------------ Any setting where the "obvious" category guess turns out to be wrong, or where the setting is nested several sub-pages deep even within the right category, is exactly the case search is built to shortcut. The deeper and less predictably placed a setting is, the more time search saves relative to browsing category by category. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It restates this chapter's own reasoning for preferring search, gives a concrete example already present in this chapter (the taskbar-icon setting) to illustrate a non-obviously-categorized setting, and explains why deeply nested or ambiguously-categorized settings are where this habit pays off the most.