PLEASE HELP! Linking dropdown selections to cue another dropdown selection

[Valenle91]

Hello all!

I am a new UX design student and I am working on a mock airline project and am having an issue linking dropdown selections with another dropdown, for example, I want the user to confirm their home country and once they make their selection, I want the following dropdown below that, to display only the origin airports within that corresponding country. I have no idea how to do this and not sure if I should be using dropdowns for this anyways or if that’s what’s making it harder on myself. Does anyone have any advice on how to do this successfully before my head explodes?

Thank you!!

[mbc66]

Using the built-in Droplist widget for this purpose is possible, and Axure has a tutorial for this:

Dynamically Set Droplist Options Tutorial · Axure Docs

Another approach is to use Repeaters, which can be filtered, so–once set up–you can easily filter your airports dropdown by country. It basically means you’ll be building your dropdowns by hand. The benefit is extensibility, ease of content changes, and especially for your needs, filtering.
However, they are not that intuitive to set up and implement–typically a long learning curve–and

Here is the Axure reference:
https://docs.axure.com/axure-rp/reference/repeaters/#docsNav

Some forum threads that might help get started:

Dropdown and 2 repeaters interacting with each other

Hi all! First time using the Repeater widget here and I’m struggling big time. In the attached example, i need to 1) constraint rows in the repeater depending on what they pick in the ‘ready for pickup’ dropdown selection. In addition to that, 2) what they select in the top repeater would filter out the rows in the second repeater. 3) When unselecting, the row should appear again. I got it working as far as doing #2, the filtering rows part. I can’t get point #1 and #3 to work after hours of…

Dynamic dropdown lists

I’m trying to create a group of 3 dropdowns with the same list of options to progressively filter based on selections. Example: All 3 dropdowns offer choices “Adam, Brian, Charlie, Daniel, Ernie.” if user selects “Adam” from the first dropdown, “Adam” will show in the first text field and option “Adam” is removed from first, second and third dropdown, leaving “Brian, Charlie, Daniel, Ernie” in each dropdown list. I’ve been playing around with repeaters and variables but coming up short. Any hel…

[uelsimon]

So…some advice for you is not to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

At the end of the day… you are communicating a story, not articulating the fullest details possible. so Id suggest the following

1. decide on the 1-3 examples you would use to demonstrate this filtering feature. (e.g. New York, Miami )
2. create 2 dropdown, one for what u want to see for each (and label them eg: +NY, +M) and also create a default dropdown which will appear if neither NY or Mi is selected. and that default dropdown can be visible on load. (unless you want the dropdown to only appear as the selections progress)
3. place these dropdown over each other (stacked on the z axis, but both with the same x,y coordinates) on the page, where you want them to appear, and setup an interaction for Loaded>show/Hide>Hide this
4. then on the master dropdown, add a case which says if selected option of this dropdown equals New York,> then show +NY, and hide +MI, hide default
5. also duplicate that case and adjust it for Miami (if selected option of this dropdown equals Miami > then hide +NY and show +MI., hide default
6. to deal with anything else being chosen, you can hide ny, hide mi, show default

since the default, NY, and Mi dropdown are all stacked at the same x,y coordinates, if you do this well, only one will show at a time, giving the ‘illusion’ that your master dropdown is filtering.

pull that off, and you’re well on your way my young illusionist. Remember it’s all smoke and mirrors. your viewers imagination will fill I the blanks and build the story to your brain that it will technically work like they see. ur job here is to make it believable, not to make it operate as it will when actually developed.

The dynamic setdroplist example above is fine, but every time u use a dynamic panel on the page…u ‘load’ your page down…and if you ever create a complex prototype with various states and progressions on a single page… you will feel the hurt on that initial load page. I’ve done some incredibly complex ones (with nearly 200 different states and interactions that felt REAL when run, but took nearly a full minute to load the page). So keeping those for groupings that require timings, or to appear as popups on screen is prolly a better use for that. and in cases like this…a simple show hide interaction should get the job done.

Hope that makes sense.
€