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OLaunch Project UI: Responsive, Filterable, Sortable

Part 1 of 4 of the OLaunch series

The OLaunch mini-project, a web app, provides information about orbital launches as proof I know the C#/ASP.NET stack.

This post covers some thoughts on the user experience. For a full-fledged app, I would give the user a great deal of filtering power over the data. For this demo app’s alpha version, I will start small, but I’d like to add additional user interface features as time permits.

This article illustrates some of the ways I’d like the user to manipulate the data: Design better data tables

OLaunch UI Features Wishlist

From a basic approach to a more sophisticated one, this is my wishlist for the OLaunch user experience.

  • List the launch data in a basic responsive grid with 1-4 columns limited to only the 40 most current items
  • Zebra stripe the rows
  • Add a next/back way of accessing future and previous records
  • Fix the grid header
  • Fix the horizontal column
  • Add sortable columns
  • Make either expandable rows or modal windows or quick views or detail windows
  • Add basic filtering
  • Add search capability

Related Work

I’ve worked with presenting complex data in a web user interface before. My team at Lockheed Martin worked on a way to present spacecraft test data through a browser instead of reams and reams of paper.

The first demo database in mySQL was ten million rows, and the information was presented using HTML and Javascript — quite the technical challenge back in the day. It’s such a relief to see modern-day frameworks like Bootstrap.

See my resume for more details.

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CR Johnson

As a software engineer with over a decade of experience working for Fortune 50 companies developing software for Windows, the web, and a few interplanetary spacecraft, she's programmed in a plethora of languages including the C#/ASP.NET stack and, recently, Rails. She has tweaked more CSS files than she can count and geeks out a little on data and SQL databases. In her spare time she works on her first novel and enjoys bicycling and dark chocolate.