Filter in Tine
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 by Björn BalazsLast week we had a closer look at the filter settings for Tine 2.0. Filters are a central part of the user interface concept, because interacting with Tine 2.0 follows a clear structure:
- John picks the sub-app, e.g. Contacts he wants and needs.
- He then gets a list of available item, which he needs to narrow down.
- He identifies the item he was looking for and is doing some action with it.
This workflow is true for almost all kinds of sub applications. Filters come in play in step 2. Here John needs some easy way to narrow down the list of items. We want to achieve this by the use of a strong and still easy to use set of filters. Take a look at a working draft of how these filters could look like:
The operator in the middle will be only active, when it is needed, e.g. for narrowing down dates or postal codes, so it does not come into John’s way when he uses <TAB> for navigating.
In the default view John will see only one filter line showing a quickfilter. This would be
[Contact|V] contains [____________________]
for address book. This way he always has a one-click search-like filter setting available for doing the 95% of the searches he needs to do. Still, the other 5%, where John needs to do a complex filtering are available just as easy!
One the fascinating ideas of this concept is the possibility to save these complex, but powerful and often needed filter sets. So John can do frequent searches with one click faster then ever before! And there is no limit to individualisation. Susan, Paul and James can define and access their most needed tasks this way. Tine 2.0 will be just right and powerful for all of them - and for you!
