Helping users visualize how things connect is tricky when relationships aren’t one-to-one. I remember staring at a sketch pad trying to map a customer-to-order system where customers could have thousands of orders, and each order might link to multiple teams. It’s messy not just for developers, but for users too. Here’s what I learned by studying how apps make this intuitive.
## Notion: Dual-Direction Relations That Feel Magical
Notion doesn’t panic when faced with complex relations. Instead, it lets you create bidirectional links. Click a customer profile, and you see their orders related. Open the order detail, and the same link lets you jump back to the customer. Even cooler: when you add a new connection (e.g., assigning a team to an order), the change auto-populates in all related views without making you save twice. It feels less like managing databases, more like connecting building blocks.
## Airtable & Spotify: Turning Connections into Filters
Airtable shows a grid of records, then lets you click any related field to filter other rows connected to that item. Spotify’s similar: tag an artist as ‘electronic’, click that genre, and you instantly see all artists in your data with that label. Both use filtering to turn overwhelming webs of relationships into digestible, on-demand views.
## Instagram: Keeping It Lightweight
An Instagram post can have 10+ tagged users, and each person’s profile shows all posts they’re tagged in. It’s not a database, but the simplicity works. Hovering a tag in a photo zooms in on that person’s face (no need for clicks), and navigating their profile goes directly to this collection. The lesson: avoid making users traverse tools to see connections. Let them stay in the flow.
## Trello & Gmail: Visual Clarity Over Complexity
Trello’s labels work like sticky notes that appear on cards and boards. Click a label, and it filters everything with that connection. Gmail takes a different approach: checkboxes for labels on emails let you apply multiple options without clutter. Both focus on strong visual cues (color, placement) over displaying the full ocean of relationships at once.
## What We Can Steal from These Designs
– Let users build or edit relationships from **either side** (bc to order, order to bc).
– Avoid one-size-fits-all: Give **filtering or zooming** tools for different needs.
– Test with real users: I once built a tag system that looked clean… until someone asked
SharedPreferences couldn’t scale for their workload.
Tech is easy. Humans are hard. The best UIs for complex data start with understanding how users will **actually** need to explore, not just how the relationships look on your schema.