This email goes out to everyone who designs data-heavy applications. Lists and tables aren’t exactly the sexiest part of design, but in my own personal experience, you need to get GOOD at creating display with lots of data, because you’re going to be doing it more than you think.

Why more than you think? Well, two reasons.

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  1. The employers/clients that have the money to hire you are disproportionately doing things with large amounts of data. Enter: tables!
  2. Mobile app screens are, because of their narrow width, disproportionately just a bunch of lists!

I’m going to hit the mobile/lists topic a bit more later. Today, let’s chat about filtering HUGE data tables.

In particular, let’s look at an example that one of my designer pals sent me: exporting hay!

We’ve got a large table of “hay tickets”. Potentially thousands of rows, and 9 columns to boot (7 of which must be filterable, denoted by asterisks)