New Approach to Lookups?

It appears that a new approach to lookups maybe on the horizon. In a recent post on the Successforce Blog Emily Liggett from the Salesforce.com User Experience team talks about some ideas that are being tested in an attempt to improve this functionality. I have always thought the current lookup process of clicking on the magnifying glass icon to launch a new window to search for a record simply took too long. It was one of those things that you just accept when using a web application because of all the other inherent benefits an online system has to offer.

Well, this trade-off may no longer be one we have to settle for. It looks like the preferred future approach may be having an auto-complete box. Imagine being able to just start typing the name of a record you are looking for and a drop down appears that starts displaying possible matches and narrowing them down as you type. Hopefully this is a feature that we will see in spring or summer of 2008. If you have a Firefox 2.0+ browser you can take a test drive of this prototype by clicking here. It will unfortunately not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer.