December 2010
Intermediate to advanced
575 pages
15h 31m
English
Content preview from Designing Interfaces, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. Lists of Things
This chapter covers only one topic: how to display lists of items in an interactive setting. Just items. Actual data—complex and highly structured data sets—isn’t covered until Chapter 7.
Why do lists merit their own chapter, you may ask?
Consider the many types of items that get shown in lists: articles, pages, photos, videos, maps, books, games, movies, TV shows, songs, products, email messages, blog entries, status updates, forum posts, comments, search results, people, events, files, documents, apps, links, URLs, tools, modes, actions. (Add your own!)
Practically every moderately complex interface or website ever designed includes lists. This chapter will help you think about them logically and clearly, understand different design aspects, and make good trade-offs when designing interfaces that use lists.
Since so many other interface design topics overlap with this one, this chapter will often refer to other chapters and patterns. Menus are handled in Chapter 6, complicated data in Chapter 7, and links and other navigational mechanisms in Chapter 3. Mobile platforms have very specific design constraints, so Chapter 10 will be referred to as well. But there’s still a lot left over.
Use Cases for Lists
Before jumping into a design, it’s useful to analyze the use cases for a list. What will people need to do with it? Which of these scenarios apply?
- Getting an overview
What impression will someone get from the list as a whole? In some cases, a user should be ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.