Interface Question for Showing Tabular Data?

Question

I am writing a report generating system where result is shown in a tabular data. The Result appear in a table with information like

Hierarchy | Title | created | updated | Available |Accessed | Expired | Average Time | Visits on Page

Now I am having problem with few things:

1. Hierarchy and Title have larger texts so how should I show them?

2. Available Accessed and Expired just have yes no values but it occupies a lot of space

3. Visits on page seems like a large title and wraps up and looks ugly.

Can somebody suggest a alternate design which is intuitive and readable.

Answer 1

Its difficult to modify these things to our own style , the best can be done is this using the abbreviations for those small columns ..

Answer 2

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Instead of using acronyms it would be more effective to revise the whole information presentation. I think that some columns will turn out to be redundant or can be grouped together. I suggest the following steps:

1. Group columns by their meaning
2. Assign names to the respective groups --> these are the new column headings
3. In each group, the former column headings now represent possible states or subordinated information: e.g. if you group "average time" and "visits on page" to "Statistics", then both have to appear together in one cell and in each row. If you replace the names by understandable icons (with the names as tooltips), much less place is needed in comparison to the current layout.

The mockup above still looks confusing as I did not use any icons or acronyms. I only wanted to outline the idea of information grouping. I'm sure, the approach can be further improved. But I'm also convinced that the long chain of table columns must be simplified by any kind of grouping.

Answer 3

For columns that show data of a known, narrow width - such as check boxes, single words or dates then fit the column width to the data. This is "Auto" in WPF/Silverlight (for example).

For columns that can hold any amount of data then use a "fill" width, where the column expands to fill the available space. This is "*" in WPF/Silverlight.

For titles that are much wider than the data then you either have to live with the title wrapping on to two lines or use a shorter title - "Visits" might be OK in your example. If your title is only a single word and longer than the data then it's harder. Abbreviating the title might work - if you can show the full title on hover or a tooltop or something.