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In order to provide more information I am explaining you with more pictures with actual functional scenario. I am creating internal ticketing support system where super admin can able to see list of fellow admin people and number of tickets raised by staffs in the organization. His main work is he has to assign tickets to admin people those who can able to solve the issues. For this purpose I am currently designing the application with drag and drop functionality without having many clicks as much as possible.

As you can see in the below image, I am having list of admin people in Column A. In Column B, the application loads the tickets which are recently raised by staffs from their respective (user) consoles. enter image description here

Super admin can select admin users based on their skill set and drag them and drop on 'Tickets' hotspots which are listed out in Column B.

enter image description here

Here is the challenge I am facing. As you can see in the above illusion, super admin is dragging the 4 selected admin people in order to assign some tickets. Even though we can drag more than 1 list items from column A by using Checkboxes that can be ended up dropping them into single hotspot let's say only on 'Ticket No. #2456' or anyone ticket in Column B.

Bottom line is, Super admin can select more than one people and assign only one ticket to them in this interaction concept. All I need to do is, I want to assign more than 1 ticket, and it does means 5 or 6 or sometimes 10 tickets listed out in Column B. How that can be possible?

Everybody knows that we can drag more than one by using check boxes or CTRL + CLICK, but drop them only on one hot spot. But I want to drop them into more than one spot in single shot without affecting the user experience. Anyone can help me out to bring an idea to get resolve this? Is there any design concept work around to get that done?

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  • For clarification, do you have cut, and paste more than once in mind, just with drag and drop? – transistor09 Aug 29 '15 at 13:39
  • Nope, there is only drag and drop, other than that nothing... – Vasethvan Aug 29 '15 at 13:43
  • But functionally it would act like cut and paste several times though, right? – transistor09 Aug 29 '15 at 13:51
  • Nope, the functionality is completely different. When I dropped the item list into Column B, some auto mail will be triggered to the respective users... – Vasethvan Aug 29 '15 at 13:57
  • The simple UI should be multiselect on left then something like double click on right to send (drop) maybe with confirmation. If the customer ask specifically for drag and drop you can only propose something else and do what he ask. – ColdCat Aug 29 '15 at 22:02
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I would abandon the drag-and-drop interaction for assigning people to multiple tickets. The problem is that it will be difficult for users to remember the details of multiple tickets while performing the drag-and-drop action -- knowing those details is necessary to assure the correct tickets are targeted. Also, drag-and-drop is a more demanding physical action, especially when multiple targets are in play (such as the list in Column B). This combination of a more difficult physical action and the demands on the user's memory will make the interaction error-prone (users will often assign the wrong people to the wrong tickets).

A simpler click-based UI would likely be less error-prone and easier for users to operate. Simply add checkboxes to Column B, along with an "Assign" button that actually commits the selected assignments. The interaction then becomes:

  1. Select one or more people from Column A (using checkboxes),
  2. Select one or more tickets from Column B (using checkboxes),
  3. Press the "Assign" button.

After steps 1 and 2, the user has time to double-check to ensure that they have the desired people and tickets selected, before committing to the assignments by pressing the "Assign" button.

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I don't know what language you are using but selecting multiple items and then moving them over to a new bucket is a fairly easy concept. This Javascript example seems to have an example where an item can be dragged over and dropped into an inner div element.

From a UX perspective, I don't know what you are trying to achieve with this example. Context matters and if you can post some details about the underlying problem, I will update the answer here.

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  • Hi Noah, I think you are asking about programming language. As of now we are not even decides that part. From a UX perspective I updated my question and may be that would bring you more idea about my issue is. Thanks – Vasethvan Aug 30 '15 at 13:48
  • As it stands this answer does not really address the issue in the question (it is helpful but not complete as you indicate in your last sentence). @Vasethvan if you updated the question and are looking for more ideas about the issue I would suggest not accepting the answer as that indicated the answer is sufficient. – DasBeasto Sep 2 '15 at 15:28

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