Which direction should the arrows point in a sorted table?

Asked 2008-12-03T18:11:23.843

In a sorted table, it's common to have an up or a down arrow indicating the sort style. However, I'm having some trouble determining which direction the arrow should point. In an ASC sort, characters are sorted 1-9A-Za-z. Should the arrow point up or down?

I've found implementations of both on the web, so that didn't help me much: Up and Down (you have to create the table first).

Is there a hard and fast rule for this? I find myself able to justify both implementations. Which method do you use? Which is more intuitive to you and why?

Edit: Some of you have suggested alternate implementations like rising bars or having letters with an arrow indicating sort direction. Great suggestions. I'm definitely open to other options. The less ambiguous, the better. It might be picky, but I'd really like there to be minimal or no confusion on the part of the user.

Edit: I ended up going with the rising and falling bars for now. It's not standard, but seems less ambiguous than the triangles. The current sort column shows three bars, small to large (left to right) for ASC, the opposite for DESC. Other sortable columns have no bars by default, but hovering over any sortable column heading (including the current) shows bars depicting how the table will be sorted if that column heading is clicked.

user-interface datatable

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2 Answers

I like:

arrow pointing down for ascending order
arrow pointing up for descending order

Why? Because it feels like I just sorted the page. I clicked on the heading and it was "Wow! Sorted top-to-bottom". Why "top-to-bottom" is called ascending, is because the numbers/letters get higher in value as the computer writes to the screen. The opposite for descending. However, the list is actually descending down the screen from the top to the bottom - a to z. When you order it the other way, the beginning of the list is at the bottom of the screen.

So to the physical human mental logic - the kind that means clockwise is close and counter-clockwise is open, it makes sense to ignore how the machine sorts and outputs the data, and think rather about how a human might sort data: start at the beginning (smallest values) and at the top of the paper, then advance through to the end (largest value) on down the paper.

The reason the beginning is smallest, is because 1 comes before 2, and the Roman alphabet starts with A and end with Z. So this is sort of default for us humans at this point in time. We write top to bottom and left to right. It has to do with handedness and the way we hold paper - I think. I'm not actually human interface specialist. I just thought about why it seems more natural. The KDE guys are human interface specialists. Take a look how Oxygen is done.

The other way I think is alright is a triangle that is actually showing that the data is smallest to largest. Again, this is rather technical and at first glance, the human might not "get it".

answered 2010-11-15T17:01:41.317

Remember that descending is for down. So, I would use the down arrow for descending. But, I always get confused by this anyway. I recommend that you use letters instead, like A-Z and Z-A instead of the arrows. Or, use them in conjunction with the arrows.

answered 2009-01-16T03:07:15.900

Which direction should the arrows point in a sorted table?

2 Answers

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