Fairly Complex List Select Problem

Question

Im wondering if you guys can add some expertise...

I have the following problem, and I would like to know if anyone here has any ideas or solutions.

Essentially, the user will create a post, and the user then needs to place that post into different categories (x amount of potential categories), but each category has X amount of linked categories.

So when the user adds a category, they also need the ability to potentially select one or all of the link categories to add to the delivery of the post.

What would you guys suggest to be a good experience for this?

Answer 1

Welcome!

I think you may find inspiration in the way products like deviantart do tag selection:

As you can see, you have a free text field, where user can input several tags. While you write, tags (or in your case categories) can be selected. You can extend this by showing the user proposed sub-categories after they entered a category in the suggestions dropdown. This may be an elegant solution.

First however, think long and hard whether you actually do need this feature in this manner. Exposing internal data structure to the user is usually a bad idea, and may hint at a suboptimal interface metaphor.

Whatever you do, try to avoid forcing users to understand or memorize your category structure. Unless it is expert software and the categories solve some massive pain for your users in an obvious way, they'll hate it.