Maybe I'm just not following. I don't see two use cases here. I see two pre-existing interfaces that don't support the use cases that do exist.
I realize it isn't always an option to go in a completely new direction. Ok. I realize it is almost never an option. But perhaps what you really need is not a blending of these two interfaces, but a third one that actually does what the users need. Retain the old ones, but offer cross connections that let them naturally fall into the more useful method. The questions you posed don't require anything like what you've suggested. Both are exacting questions with one answer. For the first, it would be a phone number. For the second, it would be a company name. What this suggests to me is a multi-field search. One of the more nifty ways I've seen this done recently is through AJAX. Each field is searched with a separate AJAX call. Some will come back quickly, others more slowly. In your case, you would throw out searches that come back empty and show the 'hopefully' one that came back with information. And if more than one comes back, you'd need some way to let the user pick which one they meant. Wolfram Alpha works a lot like this. Your examples would be searched like so: "find the phone number of $NAMED ORGANIZATION" - $NAMED ORGANIZATION Which would return entries for said organization, most likely including their phone number "find the company for which $NAMED PERSON is the sales representative" - $NAMED PERSON Which would bring back all of the records associated with that person. Which should include where they work as a sales rep. Along with many other use cases. Such as finding information on a phone number, an address, or any other fields you'd like to expose the same way in your system. Including more complicated sets of data not contained in a single table. I'm basing this on the assumption that search isn't already a paradigm for you because your tables would search too slowly. With AJAX, your users will wait longer because there is the illusion of feed back. And, if broken into parts, you won't have to wait for all 30 fields to be checked. The quick ones will come back first and give the user rich feedback that holds them over even when some queries take over a min. As is the case with some things in Wolfram Alpha. Anyway. I could have completely missed your point also. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42794 ________________________________________________________________ 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
