[Sigia-l] To sort or not to sort

[Listera]

Ockler, Sarah:

> Based on the results from our usability tests and member feedback on our
> existing site, we've designed each search interaction differently:

Excellent approach.

This is a classical UI design pattern. It might be easier to deal with it if
you break the problem into two parts: cognitive and technical.

Cognitively, there are some very tough issues, for example, what happens
when the user wants to sort on a partial result set (11-29 of 100)? Do you
go back to the server, sort the entire list and re-send set 11-29 which may
now have very different entries? Or do you sort just the current set? When
confronted with tabular data, office workers are trained to click on column
headers to sort. Do you provide this capability on any tabular data? Etc.
The answers here are largely contextual.

The technical problems are more straight forward. There are many established
methods for dealing with complete and partial sets (of records) and chunking
them. Some methods are more gentle in terms of server/DB load, others are
cached for speed (at the expense of RAM/disk space). You can even download
free DHTML code for sorting local data without a trip to the server; so
sorting per se is not that difficult an issue.

It's much easier to focus on cognitive issues first and then optimize a
technical solution.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba