layout - How To Display Too Much Data

We're building a web-based platform where the main dashboard shows a table of data for users to view and analyze. As we're growing this tool, we seem to be adding more and more columns and are running out of horizontal space on smaller screen resolutions (we're seeing some data wrap). It is important to the user to view all columns at once, so column hiding is somewhat out of the question, as is horizontal scrolling (per the boss's request and because horizontal scrolling sucks anyways). I was wondering if anyone knew of a clever UI for tables with many columns.

EDIT

Below is a screen capture of the layout of the table. Unfortunately for security purposes I had to blur out the column titles. This example has rows with practically no data in them, but in use they will have lots of data that will expand wider than their respective column titles. In response to some of the answers, it is imperative that the user see all the columns, as they are all necessary to analyze the data to make certain decisions. All the data is numeric aside from the first three columns. Thanks again for any feedback.

Ok so I see that uploading this image doesn't really do it justice... it takes up the full width of the screen at 1680x1050 resolution (22") and as data fills in the columns, the left column w/the text shrinks down a bit.

EDIT 2 I just wanted to say thank you to everyone's awesome ideas. I can only select one answer, but a lot of your ideas have proven very useful and may end up in the final product. Thanks again!

Answer

Since all of the data after the first three columns is numeric, you can round off so that the width of each column is as little as four characters.

 Full Length   Shorter   Tiny
------------   -------   ----
 $143,573.39   $143.6k   144k
     112.54%    112.5%    113 
 198,220,329    198.2m   198m

You might decide which version to display based on the amount of space available. Those fortunate to have larger monitors would still get everything. The presentation would degrade gracefully for smaller monitors

Of course, when the contents of a cell are abbreviated, you should show the full value in a tool tip.

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Update: @Oskar pointed out in the comments that showing numbers with different magnitudes makes it more difficult to compare visually. So here's a variation in case comparing relative values is more important than precision.

  Revenue 
($millions)  
------------ 
       143.6   
        93.2
         0.3
       < 0.1  

(The header in this example is wider than the data, but as others pointed out that can be solved by tilting the headers at a 45 degree angle.)

interface - Why does the space bar do page down in browsers

Why is the space bar doing a page down in some viewer apps, especially browsers and PDF readers?

For me this seems to be a bit counter-intuitive, and also this behaviour affects games and other interactive HTML5 apps, because if you map some action to the space bar it might also scroll down the page, which is not what you want. Also the arrow keys, page down button and the mouse scrollwheel are usually enough options to scroll down the page.

Are there any historical or usability reasons for this behaviour?

Answer

The historical reason is that that's what the spacebar does in more, the lowest common demoninator (and probably oldest) of text pagers. In more, it makes sense to map the largest key on the keyboard to the most common action: show the next page.

In the glory days of more, you couldn't count on mouse scrollwheels, page down buttons, or sometimes even arrow keys. more doesn't even have a "page up" feature (you can't go back).

Although in the text-based world more has mostly been replaced with more powerful pagers like less (which can move backward), that spacebar convention remains, and has even migrated to the GUI world.

character development - Writing Longer Flashbacks

In my story my MC has suffered a severe injury and has no recollection of who he was before it occurred. He knows what happened and where he was when it occurred as he was told by the people who found him and nursed him back to health.

I want a large portion of the plot (and world building) to be done through his flashbacks. While not immediately relevant to the story, it will become the final act. Any ideas on how to write longer flashbacks?

For Example:

• When he goes somewhere he visited before and has a memory of the place, but unlike Deja Vu he doesn't feel it.


• He has dreams of battles, or conversations with (in the future) key players in the socio-economic make up of the day.

I was thinking if it were almost a chapter-esque length, write the chapter in italics, and if was longer make it clear to the reader by segmenting the read with a ------------- separating the present from his mind, and typing in different text or italics. I want it to be fairly uniform between the longer memories and the shorter.

Is there a common practice?

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Edit:

While this question, which was pointed out to me by Cyn (I missed it apparently during my initial research); is quite similar, it deals with a lot of dialogue which can guide that OP's MC through the memory/flashback and through conversation it can be apparent to readers, which time period the text is referring to.

Whereas my issue and desire to implement the flashbacks is more situational (e.g. MC approaches a fortress or a valley, and remembers a snippet of his life-before, often without context to him). For the portions of his life/world that is remembered through dialogue that question is hugely beneficial, but not so much for the situational flashes, or dreams.

Answer

I am not aware of a "common practice" - writers are fickle beasts who tend to disregard rules. But there's nothing that says the progression of your story needs to be "linear unless marked otherwise".

The first example that comes to my mind is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. First chapter of the novel - the MC makes a dramatic escape from his homeland to another country. Second chapter - the MC is a very young child. The chapter is not in italics or anything like that. It's clear that the progression from chapter 1 to chapter 2 isn't linear, pursuant to the fact that one doesn't jump from being an adult to being a baby. Readers are smart, they can figure it out.
From there, the tale proceeds on two parallel timelines: one explores the MC's life after leaving his homeland, the other - his life before. The character's age and the entirely different situation provide the cues the reader needs to position themselves.

Making time-line jumps chapter-breaks is useful: it's a useful way to mark a transition for the reader. Especially once you've established the fact that such transitions occur, and there may be little else to mark it. It's also useful to establish early on that flashbacks are something that happens in your story, that is that it's not all going to be linear. In the aforementioned example, Ursula Le Guin sets it by jumping to a point where the MC is a child. This makes the transition obvious. Later on, when the MC is an adult in both timelines, she relies on the fact that the transitioning back and forth has already been established.

In addition to jumping to a sufficiently-distant point in the past, you can establish that "we're not where we were a moment ago" through switching to a different POV, through recounting it in present tense (though that has some additional effects on how the reader would perceive the passage), or through otherwise making a significant change from what has just been established. (For example, if main story-time is in summer, your flashback can be into winter.)

inkscape - How to put one object both in front and behind another object at the same time?

I've attempted (as a test) to make a circle with a bar going through it. The bar should go under one side of the circle and over the other.

I've done this by splitting the circle into two objects, however there are visible seams where the split was done, even though the paths match up exactly.

Also, the shadow under the left part of the circle doesn't go on top of the bar like it ought to, and I can't think of any way to fix this without splitting the shadow object too.

Is there a better way to do this?

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If needed I can also upload the svg.

Answer

The gap you see is due to an imperfect rendering by Inkscape and not necessarily a problem depending on how you export or use your SVG (as long as you cut precisely). The shadows however will likely cause problems, when cut up (which is the only way I can think of to make them right).

Here is my solution to this. As an example, I cut up a plain bar, because it’s easier. But cutting up the outer circles has some advantage, which I will mention later. First an image:

The left uses transparent objects (one blue, one red) for demonstration, the right shows the result.

• In the top, I reproduced what you did and just cut my bar. This leads to the aforementioned gap on some zoom levels or pixel exports (it may also happen in some PDF renderers or similar).


• In the middle, I let the two halves of the bar overlap, which avoids the gap but lets the bar appear slightly thicker around the cut (you may have to zoom in to see this).


• In the bottom, I used what I recommend to do¹. The biggest overlap is half the bar’s width. I could not find any zoom level or export for which this produced an undesired aliasing effect (i.e., a gap or a thickened bar).

Now, let’s have a look at the shadows:

The order is the same as above. On the right, we have the shadows alone for better illustration.

• The shadow for the simple cut looks okay, but we can see, that it’s somewhat weaker at the cutting position. This becomes more of a problem for fuzzier shadows.


• In the middle, we have a significant problem.


• In the bottom, we can make out the position of the cut, but the shadow is neither weaker nor stronger, just distributed differently. In particular, it does not get any worse, if the shadow gets fuzzier. The cut is even less visible, if it does not happen on a straight segment, which is why it may be advantageous better for you to cut the circles instead of the middle bar.

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¹ You can achieve this as follows:

1. Make the cut as normal.


2. Add a node in the middle of each cut edge.


3. Move each node outwards by one quarter of the width² of whatever you cut.

² For this value, I empirically found the distortion of the shadow to be lowest.

adobe photoshop - Which tools are used to create illustrations for the web?

I have seen quite a few great illustrations placed as headers or footers, for example, see this or this. I was wondering which tools are used to make such illustrations. Can I create this kind of images in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator? Are they made by using the pen tool?. I'm asking this because I have read some comments complaining about the difficulty to create a nice drawing in Photoshop.

I've also seen discussions related to vector drawings as opposed (I guess) to bitmaps drawings. What is the difference between each other in relation to web design?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

Vector files are files that plot out the drawing in lines and points. They can be scaled to any size without any loss of resolution. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, AutoCAD are all popular software that create vector type files.

Raster files are files made up of individual pixels like you'd get in a photograph. PhotoShop, Fireworks, The GIMP are popular software applications for creating and editing raster images.

Note that most modern graphic design software does a bit of both. For instance, you can create vector artwork in PhotoShop if you want or export raster images from Adobe Illustrator.

As for what tools were used for those 105 different illustrations, I imagine it's pretty much anything and everything. There's no one magic piece of software that will do everything.

terminology - What do you call this input element where a focus will automatically be transferred to next text field after being filled?

I have seen this input element often when inputting a serial number or similar code. Each text field accepts N characters, after which focus is automatically transferred to the next field. Pressing backspace when there are no characters in a field moves focus to the previous field. In this way, the fields are segregated for easier reading but content flows for ease of use.

I apologize if this has been asked before, but it's hard to search for when I don't know what search term to use.

Answer

I have always known this as Auto Tab or (Auto tab input fields). As a matter of fact a search for Auto Tab gives me different ways of implementation of this element, including:

And even Microsoft dev calls it that way.

Enter to submit comments on Facebook and StackExchange

Facebook and StackExchange have both recently changed how comments are handled.

Users enter text in what appears to be a textarea. When they press enter the comment is now submitted. Using shift-enter will insert a carriage return.

Previously enter inserted a carriage return and a separate button is used to submit the comment.

I'm interested in expert views on whether this is good or bad for usability - should other sites be adopting this approach or alternately explicitly rejecting it?

Details of the background to the StackExchange change: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/63303/why-can-you-type-new-lines-in-comments-if-they-are-never-rendered

I can't find similar discussion from Facebook about their change.

EDIT - some additional thoughts. People have mentioned not noticing the change in SE - I wonder if this is because the submit button has also been retained. In contrast Facebook have removed the Add comment button, so it is more jarring to users as you stop writing and then think 'how can I submit this?'

It was also pointed out to me that Facebook does explain about using shift-enter for carriage return, but only after the user has already pressed return in a comment and then subsequently deleted the comment.

Answer

Having a textarea submit on enter breaks with the default behavior. In theory, if you want users to be able to submit a comment by pressing Enter, you should change the textarea to a single line text field. The use of a textarea implies that one should be able to put line breaks in the input.

However, I have to admit I haven't noticed the change. That might be because I've been using the mouse to click the comment button. (Tab + Enter doesn't work on Mac OSX by default -- Tab doesn't focus buttons.) It might be that I habitually press Enter at the end of a paragraph, and a comment is rarely more than a paragraph, so by submitting the form the UI is anticipating what I was going to do next.

It might be the fact that when I do submit a comment prematurely, it's easy to edit or delete. Unlike Twitter, there's no reason to be concerned that a lot of people would have seen the half-baked version or will still have a copy of it after the edit.

Is it good UX or bad? Should others use it on their sites? I don't know. But here's three things I would take away from this interface:

1. Be consistent.


2. Test your assumptions, even if the usability tests lead you away from consistency.


3. Always provide an easy way to undo.

Edit: I'm now convinced the SE change was a bad idea. There was nothing wrong with requiring a user to press the button to submit a comment. For no good reason, SE has created a different kind of textarea with no visual affordances to distinguish it from regular textareas. It forces users to learn two different rules for textareas and remember or guess which rule applies where. Don't make me think. :-)