Representing both large and small quantities of task based data

Question

I have a task to re-create a chaser page in our existing task-based application.

The product is a SAAS product. Some customers may have 5-20 tasks which require chasing on a weekly/monthly basis. Some customers may have 300-5000 tasks.

Currently the information is displayed in a table on a web page. The user has the ability to sort through and check a checkbox before clicking "send" which delivers emails to the outstanding task owner.

As you can imagine, those customers who have few tasks to chase would prefer to manually view and action the items in the queue.

This isnt a viable option for customers with large amounts of tasks to chase. Users in this scenario will invariably send all chaser emails by selecting an option to pre-select all checkboxes before send.

It would be incorrect to assume that all our customers are happy with blindly-sending all chaser emails at once. It is in our customers nature to want to call or chase these tasks manually as they contain financial information and client relations are important.

I am simultaneously working on improving the workflow for these tasks to reduce the numbers of chasers which are required. Even if the numbers of outstanding tasks are reduced the UI will still need to be able to support potentially large/varying quantities of data.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Data visualisation isn't my strong point. I assume that some form of expansive UI would aid my customers. Thank you.

Answer 1

Give the user some sense of control

Here are some UX ideas that give the sense of control to the user (as opposed to "full automation"):

• break down the tasks by categories, so that the user sends emails in batches by type;
• as each series of emails is triggered, suggest to open a preview of the corresponding list (a simple, long, cleanly-formatted list which opens in a separate browser window) — this is great for giving the "sense of control" what exactly will happen, even if the user doesn't scroll all the way through;
• make sure the number of tasks "selected" is prominently displayed somewhere in the top of the page, there might be confusion if pagination is used.