[Sigia-l] Elegant solutions for long lists

[Listera]

"Thomas.Donehower at nethod-euro.com" wrote:

> I'm looking for elegant examples of long lists that are digestible and easy
> to navigate. Any links or thoughts are welcome. my knee jerk reaction was
> to go dropdown, but after sitting in usability sessions where users
> attempted to enter text into dropdowns I'm shying away from them for now.

This is a bit confusing. Are you looking for examples of combo boxes? (You
mention "users attempted to enter text into dropdowns". You can't do that
with standard HTML widgets.)

My general rule on long listboxes: assuming that typing a couple of letters
gets you into the alphabetical ballpark, the listbox ought to be tall enough
to contain all the elements beginning with that letter. (Obviously, not all
lists have even distribution.) If there are 25 list elements starting with,
say, "N" in a listbox only 5 lines tall, there'll be excessive and unwelcome
scrolling.

Some browser/platform combinations also allow you to use DOM tricks to
collapse details in an hierarchical list and expand them when needed, to
manage long and/or nested lists.

Another way of handling long lists is (if you can use them) frames, where
you can hide/reveal nested elements.

Best,

Ziya