data entry - How to design a screen in which users must choose a value from a list of options for each row in a 500 row table?

I'm designing an application that's supposed to help ease a very tedious and difficult task.

Prior to this app - each user would be given a spreadsheet with about 5-8 columns, and 300-500 rows. (Each user's spreadsheet would be different).

For each and every row, the user would need to populate a value in the last column. That value would be selected from a list of choices (e.g., an Excel drop-down menu) that usually contained 20-30 choices. The list of choices is exactly the same for every row.

The actual context is sensitive, but here's a hypothetical analogous example - the spreadsheet contains a list of bugs for software development project. Each column has a different piece of information about the bug (e.g, the screen on which the bug occurs, the severity of the bug, who discovered the bug, how repeatable it is, etc.) The user must review each bug, and assign the bug to a developer (from a list of about 20 developers). That assignment is made in the last column.

As you can imagine - this is incredibly tedious and time consuming.

By turning this into a web application, I will at least be reducing the time and trouble of distributing the spreadsheets, and ease the process of merging them.

But, I'd also like to be able to create a UI that streamlines the data-entry work as well.

My worst-case solution is a simple table/grid, with a drop-down menu (i.e. select element) in the last column of every row.

But surely there's a better solution/design pattern for this?

Answer

I think a much easier solution for the end user, since you say the list of choices is the same for every row, is to have the table with the last column empty, and then a separate list somewhere on the page, near the table- not a dropdown but a list with all choices visible at a glance - where clicking a name will add it to the row automatically.

This way, instead of the user having to click and scan the dropdown each time, they are looking at one list, clicking the name once and moving on to the next row, clicking again, and so on.

You'll have to take into a few other elements - highlighting the row that's next to insert the name in, logic for selecting the next available row, etc but this would require the least amount of clicks and cognition from the user (imo).