Simple ways to display search results with lots of text and enable easy parsing of information
I'm working on some test infrastructure stuff in my company and developing a web front-end meant for comparing the results of different UI tests (automatic ones running in the background mostly).
These test results come with a huge amount of information (most of it text of wildly varying lenths) including the software version they were performed on, the test suite chosen, the specs of the machine the test was performed on, the date the test was performed (the list goes on).
The web frontend is supposed to allow the user to filter from a select number of the bits of information provided with each test as well as by date ranges, finally displaying the resulting tests in some form and allowing the user to select from them from INSIDE that table like so:
While testing, I very quickly realized that a scrollable table wasnt the right way to display this data. There was too much information to parse and it was condensed too much into one element of the UI, which made individual tests hard to differentiate. Lots of text on one row, and varying length of the text was the main problem in that. It was hard to parse the information and select the tests even when using all search paramaters (there were simply too many results).
I wasn't able to fix the issue by simply adding a layer of nice css to the table and am now a bit stumped on how to replace the table. Displaying search results as tiles with borders to easily tell them apart is one thing I'm thinking about, or increasing the number of search parameters, but I'm unsure.
Has anyone got any wisdom to share on displaying large amounts of data as search results while keeping the data easy to differentiate and select from?