Autocomplete Is Awesome

/via http://geek-and-poke.com/geekandpoke/2014/9/13/simply-explained

Well, is Auto-Complete awesome? Lets look at it, starting with the above

1. Things that are hard to spell: Take my name for example — “Paolini-Subramanya”. The way I spell it is “P. A.O. and a whole bunch more”, which is just about sufficient for the restaurant to look up the reservation.
2. Saving on Typing: And, conversely, when they’re taking my name down at the hair salon (for a beard trim. have you seen my head?), it’s again just about the same. The first time around, though, involved around 2 minutes of chaos, including me finally typing in my own name.
3. Improve Suggestions: Ok, now we’re getting into Search, but this can really help, especially when the user doesn’t really know what they’re searching for.
4. Decrease Negative Results: More Search, but this time around decreasing the amount of un-necessary, irrelevant, (and sometimes wrong) results that you get. This can also help with weeding out JustPlainBad™ results (racist, sexist, NSFW, etc.)
5. Suggest The Unexpected: As a counterpoint to the above, this is an opportunity to actually suggest things that the user wasn’t looking for, but might be interested in . Mind you, this can range from useful to straight up advertising.

For more on this, including the negatives, take a look at this article.

(This article also appears on my blog)