The actor is scanning a compressed rendering — rows in a table, cards in a grid, pins on a map — and the question they brought concerns an attribute the rendering doesn’t carry. The data has it; the detail view shows it; but the subset chosen for the compressed form was someone else’s guess at what everyone compares.
Forces
- Ceiling vs. clutter — every attribute a view carries is scan cost paid on every item, and every attribute it omits is a comparison nobody can make; there is no subset that resolves this for all actors at once
- One default vs. divergent criteria — given the same task and the same starting view, actors immediately diverge in what they surface; a fixed middle serves the average actor, who does not exist
Solution
Make each view’s attribute set a live control: the actor surfaces attributes into the compressed rendering and hides them from it, per view, with the entity staying recognisable throughout.
Resources & references
- Min, Chen, Cao & Xia (2025) Malleable overview-detail interfaces — Fluid Attributes: the direct-manipulation form, the surface-then-operate workflows, the hoarder/minimalist temperaments, and the finding that 8.33% of surveyed sites offered any content customisation at all
- Min & Xia (2025) Meridian: a design framework for malleable overview-detail interfaces —
shownAttributesas the spec’s most load-bearing field: per-view attribute lists that semantic zoom, roles, and most customisation reduce to
Consequences
- each view's attribute set is the actor's decision
- the curation moves to the actor — surfaced sets drift and diverge, so the designed defaults still matter, now as a starting point rather than a ceiling
- surfaced attributes become operable, changing what a view shows changes what the actor can do with it
Related patterns
Enables
- Data view — attribute visibility is the representation leg of the framing — the query picks the items, the arrangement orders them, the attribute set decides what each item shows
- Overview and detail — overview-detail's content dimension — which attributes live in which view — is attribute visibility applied per view; surfacing is what lifts the overview's ceiling
- Semantic zoom
Enacts
- Malleability — the attribute set is the smallest piece of a view an actor can own; products that hand over nothing else can hand over this
Complements
Enabled by
- Drag and drop — the strongest surfacing control is a drag — grab the attribute in one item's detail and drop it into the overview