Best Practice for navigating to details page based on a grid selection

Question

I am designing a feature that has a work list displayed in a grid. The grid is 8 columns wide and includes a person's contact and demographics.

The grid is used to select a person and load a details page for the given person where additional functionality is offered.

My question is this: what is the best practice for allowing clickable navigation to a details page from a grid?

Givens:

• Assume all users are on IE7 or greater, Current FF, Current Chrome, Current Opera or Current Safari

• Users are line of business users with experience using web applications and value intuitive design and efficient interaction

• Double click is not an expected behavior on the web and is not being considered.

Options:

• Row as selector: On mouse hover of current row, change row color to indicate selection. On single click, redirect to details page.

• Identifier column (Person's full name) as selector: Full Name appears as hyperlink. Clicking hyperlink redirects to details page.

• Yet to be identified option. I welcome your suggestions

The goal is to choose a pattern that is predictable and reuse it within the application. Empirical evidence (searching the web) shows that both patterns are in use.

Is there a best practice and if so, where can I find supporting details?

Answer 1

Person's full name made as link is the best solution for corporate services — user sees the name and right here recognize the possibility to click it to go further about person's details — this makes full accordance of item and action with it.

Making full row clickable can confuse users, especially in case there are additional controls (to delete, to select etc.) on the row. Also if in future any similar tables will have couple or more of columns with hyperlinks to different entities — it will take efforts to search for new unified solutions. Full name as hyperlink is more protected from such changes.