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I have been playing with an idea of placing a bulk action drop down menu for a grid/table in the header of the column where the selections are done. This is to save some precious space above the table for some other tools, such as filters.

I have not seen this done anywhere, the typical solution would be something along the lines of gmail, placing the action menu above the table.

I think it is pretty straight forward - wondering if anyone can come up with downsides for this solution?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Quite straight forward, and not an uncommon solution. There are two possible downsides here however, which I've heard users reaction in training sessions.

  1. Users can't find the control. They see it, but it's not entirely obvious that you should use this one for delete or move to another location.

  2. The drop down menu hides the selected items. When deleting records you want to be sure that you delete the right items. If you hide selected items, users feel insecure, and that's bad.

Recommendations are: make the control very prominent and don't hide items with the drop down.

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Users might confuse the triangular dropdown symbol with the more common "column sort order indicator" symbol and therefore don't recognize the dropdown as such.

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Yes it is safe and pretty common solution to perform "Group Actions". But when you implement that, keep following aspects in mind.

  • A group actions button must be more visible than the standard buttons
  • It's label should be different from elements lying underneath

I had implemented something similar which looked like that

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