I have ~30 categories grouped into 3 groups. Each group contains about 10-15 categories. 

Group A

* Category 01
* Category 02
* …

Group B

* Category 11
* Category 12
* …

Group C

* Category 21
* Category 22
* …

User story
----------

* Users can select many categories from any group. It wouldn’t be an `OR` filtering, but an `AND` one.
* This is an internal app and most of the time they will have something in mind that they want to filter by. They are returning users that are very familiar with the data.
* A search bar is required.

The original page is a bit like a Excel sheet where you have 3 columns and the headers have a dropdown that shows you the categories and you can search from there.

The client wants to have **all the categories in one filter** but then by having all the categories in the dropdown it looks very busy and it doesn’t work so well on mobile. 

I was wondering if there is a technique that would work better with this use case?

![–](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ydhb6.png)