[IxDA Discuss] Ideas on displaying multiple levels of tabular data

[Ivo Domburg]

Hello Bryan,

The obvious solution would be to use two seperate data grids; one  
containing the school courses, the other containing the students.  
Selecting one or more courses 'filters' the data in the student grid  
(showing the students enrolled in the selected course(s)). Maybe you  
also would want to enable users to select one or more students which  
would filter data in the course grid.
You could also present your data in a way iTunes presents it's music.  
The browser would contain course data (subject, teacher, room, time)  
and the data grid would contain the students (id, name, email  
address).  This way the user is offered different entries into the data.
Another idea is to present the courses horizontally and student data  
vertically, like:

header01:	valueA	valueB	valueC	valueD
header02:	valueE	valueF	valueG	valueH
header03:	valueI	valueJ	valueK	valueL

Selecting a header sorts the table, just like a regular data grid.  
This one just has another orientation. When a certain course is  
selected by a click in a column other than the header column the  
column becomes wider to fit a regular (vertical) data grid in beneath  
the course data. This idea will need a good graphic design to prevent  
it to become chaotic, but I think the presenting one class of data  
horizontally and the other vertically could work.

The problem is that you want to show detailed information of both  
courses and students. And you also need a solution that is scalable.  
What is the task here (in your example)? Is it only to find student  
information based on the courses, or do you also, for instance, need  
to be able to look up all courses a certain student is attending?

gr. Ivo

On 5-mrt-2007, at 19:17, Bryan Haggerty wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> I'm interested in hearing if anyone else has come up with any novel
> solutions to a particular data presentation issue I'm having.
>
> We've all worked with presenting data in a tabular format but how do
> you present to the user a table of data in which each row can be
> toggled to show its contents, which in this case may require a tabular
> display as well.
>
> Here is a generalized example:
>
> A table containing a listing of school courses (subject, teacher,
> room, time). And each course could be toggled open to show the
> students enrolled (id, name, email address).
>
> Any examples would be helpful.
>
> Thanks,
> Bryan Haggerty
> User Experience Designer
> JPMorgan Chase
>
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