What are some effective ways to show large lists of data to users?

Whether it be a drop down list, a hover menu, with sub "fly-out" menus, etc...

I have a large list of U.S. military bases in the world for my site. That list actually contains the bases that are not yet active on the site. The active ones appear in a hover menu when you hover over the text "Select your base [hover]" at the top.

As you can see, it's currently a menu with "fly-out" sub menus. I'm concerned that as more and more bases get activated, that menu won't support it very well.

Other than a mega-dropdown menu, I'm drawing a blank on a good way to support this. What types of effective menus out there support this scenario well? jQuery based is fine as wel开发者_StackOverflow社区l.

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The other answers are good, but all make assumptions about how people are searching. Best way to think about it is: how would your user think about the base?

• Do they likely know the exact base they want? (use a text search like jquery autocomplete)
• Do they likely know roughly where it is geographically? (use a map)
• Do they know the state/country it is in by name? (use a categorized list)

Just think through how your users think, and the closest match you've ever seen, then find a way to implement that.

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For that much data I would go to a visual map with pinpoints for each base location - it will be more intuitive for your users to find what they are looking for, and also offer an interesting way to visualize the data.

Google Charts API offers a good starting point for creating map charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/gallery/new_map_charts.html

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In this case maybe a menu is not the way to go. A better idea would be to have the top level regions in the drop down, and when you click on that link you are sent to another page that has the more local bases?

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There are several approaches. The most appropriate if you want to keep the structure you have in place is to have a multi-level drop down, so the first drop down menu would show US/Overseas and as you hover over each of these, it would show an additional menu, either Countries or States depending on which you select - this then shows the bases on that state or country.

• US
  • Alabama
    • Anniston Army Depot, AL
    • Fort Rucker, AL
    • ...
  • Alaska
  • ...
• Overseas
  • Bahrain
  • Belgium
  • ...

There is a good example of this here: http://sandbox.scriptiny.com/dropdown-menu/index.html

The markup is very simple, with <ul>'s inside <ul>'s.