In the application that I am working on, there is tabular data (for the record, it is a Java Swing app using JTables). In some cases the data is sortable by clicking on the column headers.
What I want to know is what is a good way to indicate to the user if a given column is sortable or not?
I have come up with the following possibilities.
1) Put an icon in each sortable column indicating it is sortable. I personally do not like this option.
2) Change the mouse cursor into something else when it hovers over the header to indicate it is sortable.
3) Put a note in the tooltip text when hovering over the column saying that it is sortable.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Update:
I think a clarification is in order.
My question is not how does one indicate that a given column is currently sorted. That is already implemented via the up/down sort triangle paradigm.
I want to give the user a clue as to which columns can be sorted before they click on the header to sort it.
Update 2:
I think I should explain why I’m not entirely sold on option #1. It seems to me that if one is going to put an icon to indicate which columns are sortable then this will add to visual clutter. In such cases, sometimes the UI changes on “mouse over”. Case in point: Windows Vista and 7 allows one to add a filter on a column yet the indicator for this does not appear until you hover over the header with the mouse.
When you’re dealing with the UI, you have to put your mind into what the user will expect. I would almost always recommend staying with the paradigms that your users will expect. Therefore I would recommend a version of option 1)
RememberME’s post describes how this could work – You can still use arrows in column headers – one option would be to put an arrow icon in the header, but change the state of that icon if it was sorted (e.g. highlight the up or down button if the dataset is currently sorted by this column.)
Edit:
A Windows Explorer example may not be the best example here. My original text quoted below: