Ideas for UI design for editing organizational hierarchies

Question

I am working on an Rails app which has an admin section for setting up organisations. The hierarchy of which is:

• Organisation
  • Area Office
    • Division
      • Department

I have used ActiveScaffold to knock together something really quick, but it makes for a pretty horrid UI. To edit/add a department, I have find the organisation in the table, click a link that opens a nested table of the approriate Area Offices, click another link and get another nested table, finally click one more link to get the Department table.

I wonder if there are any better ideas for the appropriate design of this UI?

Answer 1

I've struggled with the same hierarchical data display problem that you are facing. In the end I kept the hierarchy and used a tree structure for the interface. To solve the usability problem of having to have the users drill down to get to the dept you could implement a search (say at the top of the tree) whereby the user can begin typing the dept name and the tree expands and selects the dept node. I can't seem to find an example of this right now but I will update later if I find one.