See if we can eliminate the drop-down menus from the results UI?

[GoogleCodeExporter]

(Not high-priority.)

I feel like the drop-downs are inelegant and slow me down, and we may be able 
to do better?

A left arrow and right arrow for each heading can accomplish all of: move left, 
move right, pivot to row, pivot to column. How: we simply have a dividing line 
(which I figure would be visible, but maybe not?), which cannot itself be 
moved, but each time you move something *across* it, that axis changes from row 
to column (moving right) or column to row (moving left).

Sorting up/down and hiding a column also have universally understood UI idioms.

That leaves "hide all similar", though. One way to handle that is: first the 
user hides, then a message appears saying "Note: 21 other axes vary dependently 
with the one just hidden; hide these too?" (Not saying I'm in love with this.)

NOW, it's true that this won't improve the UI overall if these features are too 
undiscoverable. The drop-downs do win on discoverability.

However, I can only say that when I first pull up some giant page of MxNxPxQxR 
results, it's an ingrained habit that I spend a few minutes pushing things left 
and right and left again and futzing around until it looks right, and I really 
benefited from the simplicity of doing that with the little arrows. It feels 
more responsive (even if the latency is the same either way).

Original issue reported on code.google.com by kevinb@google.com on 28 Mar 2013 at 9:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

My current thought is that the drop-down will likely stay because we have a lot 
of operations going on here.  Even  a few small buttons take up a lot of 
horizontal space and I'm really trying to keep the table tight.  Plus, there 
are a few more things that are probably going to make their way into that 
drop-down as we finish up some of the features.

That said, I completely agree that things get cumbersome when you double the 
number of clicks.  I've been thinking of trying a dialog that lets you move 
dimensions to rows and columns, hide and pick sort order en masse and then just 
apply them all at once.  I.e. "This is what I want my table to look like.  Make 
it so."  Would that address your concerns?

I've also had drag-and-drop suggested a couple of times.  That's a bit more 
substantial of a change, but seems like it might be an improvement over going 
to the drop-down every time.

Original comment by gak@google.com on 28 Mar 2013 at 9:43