Skip to main content
2 of 4
added per category clarification

Reconciling temporal relevance with awareness of existence in categorized item tables

I'm displaying an overview table of items. The items have a:

  • category
  • a date
  • additional, domain-specific information that needs to be displayed in the same view

On the overview list, only one item is shown per category. The most interesting, from the user's point of view, is an item in a given category that has the latest date, but no later than the current date.

For example, suppose that today is 2015-08-26. We have the following items, the most user-relevant ones are bolded:

  • Item 1, Category A, 2015-04-12
  • Item 2, Category A, 2015-06-30
  • Item 3, Category B, 2015-07-12
  • Item 4, Category B, 2016-11-15

However, it is also important that the user is made aware of items with dates in the future.

Two ideas that come in to mind are either:

  • provide a filter view for showing "future" items.

mockup

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups

  • or mark categories with "future" items in some way (including a relevant mouseover).

mockup

download bmml source

None of these feel perfect, however.

So, what would be the optimum way to present such data, given the two constraints (temporal relevance, and presence of "future" items)?