Best UX for accessing a list of clients from a database

Question

I'm rebuilding a web app in Laravel for managing client portfolios.

One feature is to be able to pull up a client's account quickly, either by account name or id.

Previously I just pulled a list of all the clients and put them in a javascript datatable. This paginated them automatically and provides a nice search box but as there are around 300 clients and increasing this seem inefficient and unscalable from a performance perspective.

Requirements:

• Must be able to instant-search/filter for any client; Laravel's out-of-the-box pagination is unsuitable as it only gets a partial result. Some sort of ajax method might be better.
• Concise amount of output on the page.

One thought I had was to provide a search box which auto searches based on a partial input and outputs data for the closest matching client beneath as you type.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If it's possible... consider what google search does.

As you type, provide a instant filter by client name (or whatever it's the most common thing ppl search by). Then more slowly load the rest of your data table below. Still Ajax but load it if the user has pause typing (2 sec is a good duration) or they hit enter.

Answer 2

This seems more like a development question than it is UX. The limitations of datatable you described are specific to that library, not UX. The "thought you had" is exactly what datatable offers on the demo on their website. If it has the limitation you described, you are probably looking for a different library, rather than trying to solve a UX problem. Unfortunately, UX StackExchange is not the best place for library suggestions.