Development:Big Select List

Moodle User Interface Guidelines > Big Select List

Note: This article is a work in progress. Please use the page comments or an appropriate moodle.org forum for any recommendations/suggestions for improvement.

This is a guideline for the Development:Usability/Improve_Moodle_User_Experience_Consistency project.

Problem

User needs to select one or more items from a potentially very large master list.

Context

You are designing a user interface for Moodle. (TODO: What else?)

Forces: factors that affect selection

• If there are too many items in a list from which a user has to find items to select, finding what they need becomes difficult
• If there is a list with radio buttons it can be searched with the browser's find functionality, if the user knows it
• The SELECT element in HTML can have multiple items in it selected by pushing an additional key on the keyboard while clicking with the mouse
  • this is cumbersome,
  • the selection is easily lost by accident
  • users might not know about the additional key
• A list with too many elements on it is very slow to load
• If interaction with the list (adding, searching) requires a new page load
• Some users may not have javascript support on, so it cannot be depended on

Solution

Image 1: Big Select List (Moodle 2.0)

• Put two select boxes side by side and buttons for adding and removing elements between them.
• Under each select box, add a text field and a 'Search' button next to it. (In Moodle 1.9, only under the select box on the right)

Users can select one or more elements in one of the select lists, and press [◀ Add] or [Remove ▶] to move them to the other list.

Users can write a search term (which fields of the user's profile does this search?) and trigger the [Search] to have the list only show those users with data matching the search terms. This is the only way to use the UI in case there are too many users in the list and they can not be listed all at once.

Examples and implementation

Example title

Image 1: Big Select List (Moodle 2.0)

Image 2: Moodle 1.9 version of Big Select List with lots of selectable users

• Assign role 'x' in Course: y
  • /moodle2cvs/admin/roles/assign.php