Filtering and Sorting Names and Location

Question

First post here.

I have read some relevant posts on filtering and sorting. I feel I need more help in figuring this out.

So I have this table data where there are 4-5 columns of different data types. In the first column though I have the Name of the Product and it's location. I need to provide Sorting of this column. But this column contains 5-6 entities which are stored as separate values in the database. So the question is, Do I allow sort only by 'Name' (alphabetical) and provide filters to narrow down by location specifics on a sidebar? Or do I do something like a 'Sort by' button in the first column and users can select either 'Name' or 'City' or 'State' or 'Country'. If I do this, there would be a third step which would be to choose the direction of the sort i.e. (Ascending or descending)

I personally do not like the 2nd option. I feel the power of sorting comes in when it helps you visually scan much faster.Just alphabetical sort on 1st word is easier to scan and get to the letter you are looking for. But here, the City, State and Country items are in a paragraph format and may be the 2nd, 3rd, 4th words which makes it hard to scan. And I would rather use filters to get to the result I was looking for.

Another question is about Location filters. How do I implement country, state, city filters? Do I show all values of the filter in a scrollable section or do I show top fields and provide 'Show more'? I like how linkedin combines all location types i.e. state, city, country into on section called 'Locations', shows the top 10 values in this category and provides a text input box to enter a location not in the top 10. I don't think I will be able to do that since the state, city and country are handled differently in my data-set.

Do I do top 'Countries', top 'States', top 'Cities'? or do I do a drill down type filtering where you go from country > State > city?

Answer 1

Change the way you think. What I mean by that is you know what you have, you don't know what you need. The filtering could be placed in a hidden panel or drawer that is above the the content. Use a trigger to easily get to it. It would then push down the data table. This way it's not in the users face taking up valuable space but is there when needed.

Allow sorting of the content that's returned after that.

Answer 2

How about a filter text field, where you can type in filters which are auto-completed to known legal values? These could be added similar to tags in small button like boxes below that text field as they are added with a button/icon to remove them. This would allow you to add many filters, and it wouldn't matter whether they filtered by country, city or state, but they would have to be valid tags of some kind. You could also add some hidden meta-data to such tags (whether they are country tags or what).

One sorting method that is nice for geographical data is sorting by distance. If you have geo-tags for data, you can calculate the distance relatively easily. This does take some processing, and should probably be done as simple as possible. For instance to find the shortest distance ones, use just the distance squared (don't calculate the square root for Euclidean distance). The client side can do more exact measures, while the server handles a rough selection. This is just a suggestion for the sorting, though. I'm guessing you want to limit the amount of data the server sends in the first place, so some processing would at least be done server side.