Which component should I use to select user's friends in order to notify them?

Question

I'm building a responsive webapp (mostly in Javascript/AngularJs).
I would like to build a form component easy to use whatever the device is (website desktop or mobile).

The use case is to expect the logged user to select some of his friends (potential huge list), so that by validating the form, they can send a notification to them.
The content representing each friend in the list would be: Photo + firstName/LastName

Which style of component should I use?

I thought about this kind of typeahead, coupled with a table of results.
When user would press enter, table of results would get the selected friend.

Any good or better idea?

Answer 1

The technical term for that is "Incremental Filtering". It's always hard (particularly in mobile) to show big sets of data, but IF the user is going to know who to send this to right away, for example, if the user is going to have the addressee already in mind, the expected behavior is for the user to start typing the friend's name, and this is optimum.

I would recommend you give instructions on the field's placeholder. Your example was a bit barren and we cannot expect users to know what to do with that.

Another thing to watch out for is what about the users that don't have lots of friends (if this is not pulling from Facebook or Twitter of course). What will they see? Can they invite users to join this service?