We have several tables in our software and for most of them there's the possibility to sort the entries. When opening a new view with a table there's also a default sorting for most cases, which means that the table entries are already sorted by one of the columns and within that column in a certain direction.
The user is able to change the sorting (column as well as direction) by clicking on a column header.
Now the question is: Is it better to show a sorting indicator by default or only after the user interacted with the column header?
Possible advantage of showing it by default:
-The user doesn't have to find out for himself which of the columns is defining the default sort order.
Possible advantage of showing it only after active sorting:
-The user is able to see if he/she changed the default sort order manually by getting a visual feedback (indicator appears after clicking the table header).
Answer
I know from experience that it's better to add a default sort indicator. For example, many of our users didn't realised the table columns are sortable and didn't even tried to sort them if there was no indicator. So we were receiving constant questions/suggestions to make the columns sortable.
Our solution was to add default sort indicators like this:
If the column is unsorted:
If the column is sorted descending or ascending by default:
or
And if the column is not sortable, we don't show any indicator
We didn't got anymore feedback/questions from the clients if the columns are sortable ever since.
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