Showing two kinds of tokens

Question

I am writing a carbon accounting Web app.

Carbon tokens are non-negative integers. Tokens always go in pairs: a non-retired token and a retired one. The corresponding retired token is obtained from non-retired by adding one. The non-retired ones are always even, retired ones are odd.

A token may have a name, but may go nameless.

How to present a user to choose a token?

If I list all the tokens, the user may confuse which are retired and which retired one corresponds to non-retired one.

I can add checkbox "Show retired tokens" and show a list of either non-retired or retired tokens dependently on the checkbox. But this way the user may also not understand which retired corresponds to which non-retired. Maybe, I should show the non-retired token number in parentheses, when listing a retired token, and vice versa?

The task is simplified by that the usual number of tokens for an organization is just 2 (one non-retired and one retired), but this may not always be the case.

Answer 1

I'm really not too familiar with the topic at hand, so it's hard to give a definitive answer. I would consider the following:

• in what other context to users see/manipulate carbon tokens, and how are they displayed there? If you have no reason not to, copy the familiar look.
• is this a personal preference thing, like date format or dark mode? Make it a persistent user setting.
• are there use cases which demand a specific setting, while other usage demands another setting? If so, add a toggle/menu to quickly activate sensible defaults.

I would go with a paper prototype here. Quickly craft some paper wireframes with different versions and get them in the hands of experts. See how they act and what they say. Iterate.