Your point about users needing to "think they're close to the results they want" is a very good one, as it speaks directly to the need for a strong scent of information.
One way to provide this might be to display the results in a style similar to the Apple TV or Front Row interface, where additional items are shown "peeking in" from off-screen. That would encourage users to keep paging, and provide a visual cue that additional pages are available. On another note, I would be careful asking users what they want - I notice that you said of one feature " the majority of our users tested said it was nice to have but they probably wouldn't use it." It is notoriously difficult for users to predict their own future behavior. It is better to rely on observed behavior than reported preferences. On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:58 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Part of it depends on what your users want. When I was working on a site > search project, the general range of results people expected were either 10 > or 20. More than 20 was overkill, less than 10 didn't give them much > confidence that they'd seen a good snapshot of what was in the results. We > offered a "how many items" option and the majority of our users tested said > it was nice to have but they probably wouldn't use it. > > Part of it depends on the use of the list. We were acutely aware that users > rarely move past the 1st page of search results unless they think they're > close to the results they want, so we chose 10 results because we were > confident our top 10 results generally had what they wanted. (If we'd've > had less confidence we'd've gone with 20. We didn't have enough confidence > to go with 5 results.) But for shopping or browsing a category, different > mental paradigms are in play. > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
