UI Design: Ideas For User Look-Up / Selecting User

Question

I'm trying to design an interface for a web-based application that allows the user to look-up people (in my case it's patients for their medical records). I'm trying to think of very fast but accurate ways to search for users by their name.

I was thinking of typing the patient's name and it will match both first and last name, ordering them in a suggestion (autocomplete) list. I've done this before with several projects, but the problem that I have is that the text field could still be edited.

This method of looking up users should be akin to a drop down list of all users, but much quicker to search through and filter results.

Of course some terrible suggestions are populating all people in a drop down list and scrolling through. But if my patient list has several hundred people, this is a huge pain and a waste of time.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for creating a quick user-search function for assigning/looking up people very quickly?

EDIT: Sure I understand the use of autocomplete and have used it many times. But I only want the user to pick from a specific list of users and not be able to "search" for a user. Example: In an e-mail application (restricted to contacts) you search for contacts for the TO field. These are specific people to "search" for.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

i think something lke jquery autocomplete would work really nicely, the user can type free-form in the text-box, or accept one of the suggestions. after accepting the suggestion, it will appear in the textbox, and the user can still edit it further.

yeah, as James Curran mentions, you could filter the completions using a script on the server, for example:

$('#name').autocomplete('search.php?action=names');

search.php could lookup only the items available to the currently logged-in user...

Answer 2

For my website (NJTheater.com -- unfortunately, you'd need an admin login to see the page I'm talking about), I use a jQuery autocomplete plugin (not the jQuery UI autocomplete, which is based on a early version of the same code). It allows for getting the data via ajax, calling a webservice. (I have to selected from 13,000 people)

The control has an option to require the item be from the select list.