I am working on complex system with lots of tables; some with only few columns, some with many (~15+).
With consistency being one of the usability principles and generally encouraged in UI world, I am struggling to decide what is the best approach to add new records and edit records, considering I have tables with different sizes.
Currently, we do the following:
- INLINE row for 'New record' / 'Edit' - Table has 6 columns or less
- MODAL FORM With a background, it covers the table when creating a 'New record'. The table consists of 6-15 columns.
- NEW PAGE FORM for 'New record' / 'Edit' - Table has 15+ columns or has more complex flows / supporting flows within records
My goal is to keep the user on the table view as much as possible, but with larger tables, it's difficult to be consistent and say "we'll only use 'INLINE' or 'MODALS'"- because the content simply will not fit. On the other hand, I don't want to take users to a new page for 4 fields-forms.
Does anyone has experiences how to handle this with consideration to consistency principle?
Or did you try to have different formats for 'New record' and 'Edits' in tables - do you have any user feedback?