An important default filter being set – should a "Clear" button clear this important filter?
Working on a system that has a TON of data - and trying to optimize it since so much data comes out of it. There are a lot of filters in this system and all data was returned, bad I know. In any event, I recommended to the team to have a new filter called "Requires My Action" and default it to checked
so that when the user logs in they only see their records.
This worked out pretty good and has drastically reduced the amount of data... However, on the form the original developers have a button to "Clear All Filters" and upon clicking that is now clearing this new defaulted filter.
I recommended to the team that this button clear everything except this field otherwise there was no reason why we defaulted it from the beginning. For instance, a user logs in and this filter "Requires My Action" is set giving them 5k records say. He / She then filters on additional fields like a site or plant name and they get 2500 records. Imagine if this same user thought ok wait I didn't want to filter by site/plant I wanted to filter by status so they click "Clear All Filters" and suddenly now they are seeing 50k records instead of 5k records since the "Requires My Action" is cleared as well.
To me users are not going to go to each filter (for instance we have multi selection checkboxes) and uncheck or unfilter each field - its too much work. Most users are going to simply click a button that "Clears All Filters", but I truly think that the checkbox "Requires My Action" should not be cleared as it clearly changes the amount of data. It happened to me several times and I am a power user.
Your thoughts? Should this button clear ALL filters including this new filter?
In the image above when a user logs in we default the requires my action (or use their session values to set this checkbox). If they start picking on other filters and then want to clear these filters - should this important filter be cleared - my experience and my thought is NO it should not clear, but wanted to get your feedback.
please note i am not asking whether the button name should be changed i can easily do that. I am asking does it make sense that clear or filter reset keep my important checkbox checked??