So I have encountered a similar situation described as the one below.
Lets day a sales person from Ford is shipping a new car to one of the thousands of rental car places they do buisiness in the world. They encounter a web page as like the one below.
They want to do the following
- Search for the right customer out of thousands of possible customers to ship the car to.
The current thought is to show the user an initial list of customers when they first click the search box. However initially front end developers wanted to send all the customers from the DB to the browser to show that list (that would be over 1 million entries and take 4-10 seconds to load which would be a poor experience, and its not needed).
I figured to either A
- show a smaller set of customers maybe the first 50-100 ordered by size, or alphabetical order
Or I could do B
- do some sort of a text placeholder, similar to how facebook & google does image placeholders of things of outlines of the images in grey text showing that something will go there but its not there yet. This was a rough idea just let them know that's canned data
Or is there a better way to deal with showing a preview of the data to come after you filter a large amount of data
- I know that loading the entire dataset (200,000+ entries is not a great idea because they cant search it clientside as well as I can using SQL, and sending all that data over the wire isnt needed)
- Should I show a subset of the data?
- This subset is most likely not going to be the customer they were looking for (if i show 50 canned customers out of 200,000 the odds they were looking for them is slim).
- Should I show some other sort of placeholder text like maybe a sample table with just the columns named?
- Is there a better way to do this?
Note after you search for a customer you would click on their name to do something else. (mind you this is far from a full picture there will be clues showing a user that they are supposed to select a customer i just threw together this mockup)