Unergonomic classifier selector on /search/

[pv]

The classifier filter selector panel on /search could probably be improved.

• Especially the "Topic" section has very long vertical size.
• You need to scroll vertically quite a lot to locate what you are looking for.
• Word-wrapping for this looks suspect (see screenshot below).
• Sub-categories vs top-level categories are indicated with small intendation level differences. It's hard to keep track of what is a subcategory and at what level.

I'm not sure exactly how to improve this, but perhaps a nearly full-width "pop-up" selector screen would be better --- the selector lists seem too long to fit well in any way to the left-hand panel.

The display indicators warehouse currently has for the "currently active" filters are good, so perhaps it's possible to make the "Add filter" selection more dialog-like. The mobile/narrow-screen interface goes a bit to that direction, but it doesn't make full use of the horizontal space available for pop-up dialogs.

For comparison, the old pypi screen makes more efficient use of horizontal space, and indicates sub-categories with large headings. However, the categories don't work together with search in the old pypi like they do in warehouse.

Screenshot:

Old pypi screen for comparison:

[ThomasWaldmann]

When fixing this, remember to also make it easier to filter for supported python versions, see also #3008.

[di]

I don't have any great ideas about this one. Deferring to @nlhkabu but happy to implement whatever she decides.

[nlhkabu]

Thanks @pv for raising this :)

I agree that this is something that we'll need to address, however, I don't think it needs to be on this milestone cc @brainwane

My plan is to do some user testing on this page to establish how people are using the filters (if at all) - and then propose some alternative designs. I don't think this is going to be an easy problem to fix, so it might take some time to come up with the best solution.