Ask HN: What's the best generic UI/UX for user-specified sort order?

For some arbitrary list where you can't rely on an implicitly comparable attribute.

I'm familiar with buttons to move up or down, effectively swapping positions. And draggable cards. Even multi-select of cards to move batches at once.

Is there any good experience once things get to, say, a thousand items?

I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more friendly than (or even comparable to) working with text in an editor..

Are there any interesting, potentially radical approaches that haven't yet become commonplace?

1 comment

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 9.5 ms ] thread

_ah 5y ago ↗

The closest analog is probably large spreadsheets. In those cases, if you're not sorting on the data itself, the typical operation is to cut/paste a range of rows.

But honestly if you're expecting your users to manually sort 1000+ items that's a bad smell. I suggest you don't actually understand the problem you're trying to solve.