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Hi!

I'm designing a CRM-style experience to help nurses manage their daily tasks, and I'm running into a bit of a dilemma. I want nurses to be able to quickly edit the "Due Date" and "Task Status" of their tasks, as that is key to their workflow - so I threw in a pencil icon to indicate the inline-edit affordance; however, there's other info available to them on the same screen that they never feasibly would need to edit ("Surgeon," "Procedure", etc).

Is it okay to display editable and non-editable fields on the same page? Are there best practices to go about doing this? (Note: all the info you see does indeed need to be there)

Thanks in advance!

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There's nothing wrong with displaying fields of mixed read-only attributes. As long as they are visually differentiated, and the reasoning is clear (as it is in this case), it is fine.

As a related note, for your Task Status input, I recommend changing the type to a button group or a select box if possible.

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  • thanks mrcharlie ! Thats super helpful great to hear. But would you mind explaining why you'd recommend a button group or select box for the "Task Status" input? Wouldn't it be not ideal to have a completely different design pattern for a single field? Thanks again!
    – Conor
    Oct 9, 2018 at 21:37
  • @Conor Whatever goes in the task status field should fit the workflow of the nurses. In this case it may be better to have an arrow to move the status to the next stage in the workflow rather then presenting options for every different task status (and perhaps an undo to move it back in case the user clicked it forward accidentally)
    – Franchesca
    Oct 10, 2018 at 9:31
  • @Conor "Task Status" is generally a fixed set of options (e.g. Beginning, middle, end), and using a text input allows for user error, and slows down the process. Buttons are faster and less prone to error, especially if designed correctly. As another example, if it was asking for a birth date, you shouldn't let it be a text input either. It should be separated into number fields with inline validation.
    – mrchaarlie
    Oct 10, 2018 at 14:35
  • @mrcharlie Thanks so much for clarifying, this is extremely helpful
    – Conor
    Oct 23, 2018 at 13:29

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