We faced a challenge on a project for a hospital: How to let a user quickly and easily find a card by Physician Name and by Procedure? We were advised that the user might be looking first for a physician, and then for procedures they did, OR first for a procedure, and then for physicians who performed that.

We came up with a “double selector” — a dynamic combination of a FAYT (Find As You Type) dropdown and a combo box:

The user can start typing a physician’s name into the left box, and choose from a FAYT to find the doctor. Once the doctor is chosen, the left box flips to be a dropdown, which the user can then use to choose the procedure of interest.

Alternately, the user can choose a procedure using FAYT:

Once the user chooses a procedure, the physician text box flips to be a combo box.

We thought this was an interesting solution — I’d be interested in hearing other places where this UX paradigm could be used!