Assign every item in a list to a category on a smartphone

Question

I'm currently trying to implement an OPML-Import in my rss-reader. However, opml-files don't give any information about the "category" every item should be assigned to.

Therefore I got the problem that I have to assign every item to a category manually.

As it is not rare to have a list of more than 30-50 entries it would be quite annoying to open a dialog for every single item.

I thought about implementing a list in the following schema:

1. (Current Entry) --- (Current Category)_Dropdown
2. (Second Entry) --- Sports_Dropdown
3. (Third Entry) --- Politics_Dropdown

In this approach you can assign every item to the desired categories.

But even this would require the user to manipulate every item with clicking on the dropdown first and then selecting the category.

A second idea was to "mark" my items with the category. Every category got a color (in my approach) which I could use for marking my items inside of the list.

This would lead to the following implementation:

Sport [X] , Politics [ ], Economy [ ]

1. Item 1 [x]
2. Item 2 [ ]
3. Item 3 [ ]

By clicking on Item 1 the item would be assigned to Sport as Sport is currently selected. Instead of using [x] I would use the appropriate color.

What do you think about this approach?

How about giving the user multiple choices to deal with categories inside of the list? Like having the feature I suggested in the beginning and also the second idea?

Regards

Answer 1

Your task is quite typical. For example, look how they do it for marking emails and mimic this interaction. This will guarantee intuitiveness of your UI.

Keep in mind "noun"−"verb" is more appropriate interaction style, where "noun" is an object, and "verb" is an action. So user first selects multiple items and then applies action to the selection.

For small screen device it's nice to "hide" marked items. This allows to use more space for unmarked items and focus user on "marking" task. To do this you can wrap all the marked items into the appropriate ("Sport", etc.) category item. Finally, you'll have empty list and three contracted categories items, which are filled with items. The the picture below: