Multi choice UI - best practice

Question

Hello,

Mayby it's not a question strictly for software developers but let's face the truth... everyone is sometimes an UI designer - web apps, winforms... everyone have to place some components...

Now here is my question: Whats the best way to present multichoice from a really big list of options (about 1000 positions)? What in your opinion looks the best and is relatively easy to implement?

Last days I've got this problem twice... Once in web and once in desktop app... Finally I've decided to give user a dropdown list with possible options and an 'add' button, but I'm not quite satisfied...

What are your sugestions? Thanks for any voice in this subject :)

Answer 1

If you need to allow picking multiple items from a large set then I think separate list of what to pick from and list of what you've already picked with an Add is pretty good.

You may be able to present the list of what to pick from in some sort of hierarchy or dual dropdowns. Pick a state, then pick a city for example. Also look at the preferences window in Eclipse. There is a free-form search box, so you type a few characters and the from list is filtered.