On Dec 7, 2009, at 8:05 AM, Jeff Kraemer wrote:
How do you decide whether to include a means to control how many list
items to display?
So, how do you decide whether to include it? Do you follow a general
principle (give the user more control/take away little decisions), or
do you decide based on the users' needs in a given project? And if
so, how do you define those needs?
Jeff,
I'd like to suggest that the reason you're struggling with the right
answer (and why nobody who responded really had a concrete solution)
is that you're possibly asking the wrong question.
I'd like to suggest that users don't care how many items they see.
They only care about seeing the right items.
Choosing an item from a large collection involves a three-step
process: winnowing, selecting, and validating.
Winnowing happens before you present the list. It's the process of
choosing filters and specifying what the user doesn't want to see. If
you winnow the choices properly, every choice you present to the user
is a high-quality, likely candidate.
Selecting happens during the list. Here the user is comparing one
choice to another, and picking the one that best fits their needs.
Validating happens when the user has made their choice, giving them a
single result where they can ensure they've made the right choice.
So, how many items should you display? All of the best, most-likely
choices and none of the rest.
The important factor is to ensure you're giving enough information to
select. What's enough information? That'll depend on what you're
displaying in the list and how you display it. The trick is you want
to prevent the user from clicking to find out if the item is what they
want. They should know before they click. (If they click before
knowing, that's likely to lead to pogosticking, which is very
undesirable as it almost always leads to task failure.)
Because you want to have enough room to show the important
information, you also want make sure you've eliminated any choices
that are unlikely. That's where good winnowing comes in. Giving the
user a good set of controls to choose the subset of choices that will
most likely satisfy their needs is an essential quality of a good
experience with lists.
If you do all that, you won't need control to choose the number of
list items displayed. The winnowing will reduce the number to a
manageable set that you'll want to present in its entirety for the
user to select from.
You can read more about this here:
Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
http://www.uie.com/articles/galleries/
I hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: @jmspool
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