Has anyone read or discussed about design patterns for selecting and/or interact a record row in a table or list? I'm working on a project that a user needs to interact with single record (edit/view and delete) in a table most of the time. However once we get into the discussion of interaction consistency, it gets more complicated. I would like to know if anyone has done any research in this area. We can generally categorize the interaction into 3 types: Case 1: A user needs to manipulate each record/row one at a time. The action is limited to one thing (two at most) only. For example, a user will select a row in master table to view/edit it in a detail panel. In our case, we have "edit" (or view depend on the status of the record if it is still editable) and "delete" actions. We are discussing a few approaches: a) a user can click anywhere on a row to view or edit the detail, a trash can icon will be available on the same row for deleting the record. The drawback for this option is that there's no direct link or button to spell out "edit" action even though we can provide mouse over highlight to hint the rows can be clicked on. In our field studies and usability tests, we have found that sometimes users didn't get the clue that they could interact with the grid. b) provide edit/view and delete links on each row. The drawback for this approach is that some users may get used to click on the row from other application experience and expect the same here and also edit and delete links take more pixel real estate than option a. Case 2: A user needs to manipulate each record/row one at a time. There are more actions can be done for each record. Design approaches for this case are: a) similar to option b in case 1, provide action icons/links on each row. Other than the links, the row is not clickable. Links can take too much space in this case. b) provide links on each row as option a, but the row is clickable as well. In this case, a single click on anywhere on a row and load detail record immediately in detail panel can be problematic and slow down performance. c) Since there are more actions now, each row can get cluttered with action icons/links, so move the actions to a top action bar may make sense which is similar to outlook. The drawback on this approach is that each action takes two clicks now, select the row first, then click on the action button. This approach makes more sense for aggregated or batch editing as in the following case 3. Case 3: A user needs to do mass edit to multiple records at a time in the grid. The solution seem to be more unified in this case: provide checkbox on each row and allow user to select multiple items then perform actions by click on actions on top or bottom of the grid. So is there a magic formula that provides intuitive yet consistent user experience for all 3 cases? Should the whole row be clickable? When provide action buttons on each row, which way is better practice: to put the buttons on the far right or far left of the table? Will it cause confusion if action buttons are on top for mass edit grid and then on each row for other cases? By the way, lots of our end users are novice computer users, they don't use outlook or surf on web. And yes we are going to do usability test eventually on this, but for this project we don't have time and budget to do it with end users now, so I'm asking you interaction guru's opinion now. J Thanks, Kun
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