I feel your pain on this one, Juan. I deal with the same sort of issues on most of the internal apps I work on. Your initial thought about collapsing columns together is a good one.
Looking at the example data you provided, my first inclination would be to clump Client Number, Client Name and Trading Name together under a "Client" or "Client Info" heading. Policy Number, Type and Start Date seem to refer to "Policy Details." Another suggestion is dependent on the size of the data. Let's say that in your example "Channel" is a 1 character alpha field. So instead of having a column header of "Channel" you could label it "C". This saves you some horizontal real estate. It does lack an inherent intuitiveness, BUT you're building internal application and it's likely that the users will pick up on this naming scheme very quickly. Keep in mind, though, that client requests for filtering and/or sorting on any or all of the columns could send you back to square one. A final thought... don't be afraid to push the client to justify the inclusion of a particular bit of data. I've found that clients will usually ask for more data on a screen than they need to accomplish the defined task. My diplomatic approach on this is typically something like, "My understanding of this screen is that the user is attempting to [update customer data]. Given that, how does the inclusion of [minor league hockey scores] help the user accomplish that task?" You might actually get lucky and have them agree to *remove* data from the screen :) I'm behind a Massive Firewall Of Death (tm) here at work so I can't post any sample wireframes, but I'd be happy to share some examples for you if you contact me via email. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34312 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
