Customers with multiple locations

Question

We've been creating an admin portal; the user of the portal would only be the staff at the company as this will be an internal tool. The issue we've run into is that we have conflicting opinions on the best way to display the information.

Each customer can have multiple locations(address, postal code, etc). Each of these locations can have separate appointments. They would like to be able to go into the customer record and select the location; upon selecting location it will show all the information for the specific location(including appointments) and allow an appointment to be made or edited.

Since we are using bootstrap I'm thinking a simple form with pill or tab navigation in a sub panel would be best; the possible issue with this is that if there are more than 5 locations it might look cluttered on the bar.

They're hoping for a page with multiple panels like the one below; but I struggle to see how that would work.

If anyone has experience with a similar requirement or opinions on this any input would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would certainly not recommend arranging the panels in a grid layout like shown in the picture. Instead a linear arrangement would be neat and easy on the eyes considering the formal nature of this application.

A grid layout might be convenient on something like information portals like excite.com

Alternatively as a solution to the question I would recommend using the lists styles available in Boostrap. You may have to split the location information into a couple of pages at least.

-First show the customers in the form of a list, with names and other basic information.

-Clicking on them may show the different locations in a separate page along with the customer meta data on top.

This way you could split the navigation and make it convenient.

There is another way to do this as well: Using modals.

-Clicking on customers in the list should display a pop up with relevant information. - In this method you can avoid navigating to other pages.

If you have too many customers, I would recommend having an ajax based search on top of the customer list and/or an alphabetic filter.

Hope this helps.