Elegant UI for associations with a lot of data

Question

I have an e-commerce website where it is necessary to make a number of associations e.g. a product needs a category, manufacturer, associated products, etc.

When there is only a fairly small, limited amount of data e.g. Manufacturer I simple use a drop down or option boxes for the user to pick the relevent field / fields.

However for items such as associated products, where I have thousands or products it is not viable to use one of these methods. At the moment I use a searchable / paged table that the user then clicks a button to add the association, this works, but it is pretty time consuming for the user and not what I would consider an ideal solution to the problem.

Has anyone implemented a solution to this problem or could they offer any advice as to how they would come at this from a UI standpoint?

Thanks for any help you can be

Answer 1

The solutions I can think of are:

1. Auto-complete
2. Recent associations
3. Smart associations

There may be more depending on exactly what you're doing, so feel free to add more details or screenshots and I'll think on it more.

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Auto-complete

Using an auto-complete field would speed up the process for your users since they wouldn't have to hunt through the table for the association. Rather they could just start typing and have a suggest box appear below the field that allowed them to select what they're looking for.

If you matched your auto-complete on several key fields (i.e. manufacturer and product name), there's a pretty good chance that the user would be able to find the association quickly.

You could also code the suggestion box in such a way that it showed multiple pieces of key data. That way if the user wasn't quite sure what they were looking for, typing a few characters in the field would give them an idea of what they could search with.

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Recent Associations

Below your auto-complete field, you could add the 5 to 10 most recent associations that had been made. That would allow your users to quickly add many products to the same association without having to use the auto-complete each time.

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Smart Associations

Separate from the above two mechanisms, a smart association is something I first saw when theming a Shopify store. They allow you to automatically create associations based on the products key fields by defining conditions to include or exclude products:

Create Association 'Pants'
Where product title contains string 'pants' or
Where product title contains string 'capri'

The above is controlled by a set of dropdowns and textfields and got around the pain of manually creating associations.