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I am building a screen for a rather big platform and I am trying to figure the best position for settings buttons for a column in a table.

The table holds information about players and their available options. 1 or more player can be displayed. Above the table there is an action menu with available actions for the player - the user can delete, edit, move, link etc a player.

Throughout the platform there is a consistency - there is always a content area and action area above it. When the user selects an element in the content are(usually the content is placed in a normal styled table or form) - the options available are loaded in the action menu.

enter image description here

In this case is when user selects the column - the action buttons load. This is also the first option - the user must click on the column and the options load.

So here is my concern.

The number of players can be 1 and 15 selected - so there could be a horizontal scroll. The user is able to close and open players to see the assigned options. The consistency of the enterprise is that the actions linked to an element are loaded in the action menu. But I am not sure this would be the ideal option here.

The other option I am thinking about is to have a settings button in the top right corner on each of the players columns which will show the options on click - and in the action menu there would be filtering options. (sorry can not upload another picture due to lack of points)

What do you guys think is a better option? It would be nice to have the consistency but I don't believe that it is not intuitive to select the column in order to see the options. Also I am concerned that when there are two many players loaded it can get confusing for which column they refer.

Unfortunately I can not test it with the user.

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  • why cannot you test with the user?
    – Toni Leigh
    Apr 11, 2016 at 18:18
  • My location is in Europe and most of the user of the product are in Africa, Asia and South America...so there are a lot of logistics involved and for the moment is not a possibility.
    – Loro
    Apr 12, 2016 at 6:21
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    You ought to try Hallway Testing - according to Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange co-founder) and his 12 points for good software teams hallway testing can find many simple bugs at a very early stage - you literally just grab whoever is having a coffee break or who walks past your office and ask them to sit down and do simple tasks which you observe - you can get a lot from this process: (link here: joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)
    – Toni Leigh
    Apr 12, 2016 at 6:32
  • Also, once you put the product out, you can use tools like TeamViewer or Zoom to share screens over the internet during a video call, this can be very useful too
    – Toni Leigh
    Apr 12, 2016 at 6:33
  • @Loro , Can I as a user edit multiple players at once or can I only edit one user/one row at a time? This is very important when designing our User Interface.
    – Ilias Bennani
    Aug 19, 2016 at 7:45

1 Answer 1

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“The consistency of the enterprise” is something that seems to be implying the “better” option, inevitably the 1st one. Ballpark answer in relation to this:

Stick actions menu to the top of the viewport when user starts scrolling so it’s always visible. However, this would have to go in conjunction with the filters (showing all players, selected only, etc.) and the filters would in that case probably need to reside right beneath the actions menu (and also be sticky).

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