Incremental search

This immediate feedback often allows the user to stop short of typing the entire word or phrase they were looking for.

[3] As programmer Robert John Stevens, now CEO of WriteExpress, watched users at the WordPerfect Usability Lab in Orem, Utah use the 5.1 Speller that he and Steven M. Cannon ported to Windows, he noticed that when a word was not found in the dictionary and no alternative words were presented, users seemed lost, moved the mouse cursor around the page and even exited the Speller.

Stevens coded the solution: as a user typed in the edit box, Speller would suggest words beginning with the letters entered.

The feature may also be used during searches for songs whose name or artist match a string in a media player.

Another variation is to filter through long lists of options or menu items that may appear within the user interface itself.

"[7] Incremental search has been criticised for exhibiting low affordance,[8] as the text fields which provide it offer no visual indication of that fact until after the user begins typing.