I think pagination is a pain. For HTML, it is frequently necessary to avoid bloated pages that take a long time to download, and frequently won't render until the full data set has been downloaded. AJAX is better here, but not perfect. Multiple pages make the user experience much more clunky in my opinion for all sorts of reasons - such as doing and maintaining nice multiple selection of items, and trying to read multiple rows where one is the last row on one page, and the next is the top row of the next page. Scroll bars are more flexible here.
My favorite approach can be seen on the iPhone (and other places) when searching say the app store - you get the top items plus a "25 more" button at the end. So you don't have to wait for it all, but can get more if you want it. Or you just tell the user "I have truncated your results at 1000 matches". It also avoids getting a tiny scroll bar when there are thousands or millions of hits. It also copes with cases where you don't actually know how many more hits exist yet (you have stopped looking). Of course there are more sophisticated techniques to do lazy loading of data - so you only fetch the data being displayed on the page. But this can be hard to do nicely with HTML (easier I assume with Flex and JavaFX?). But if a really long list, again the scroll bar can get painful. And frankly, how often is a million hit list actually useful? Having said that, we *frequently* use pagination on web pages because its "safer" in some ways. No-one complains about results not being easily accessible, and no unexpected page freezes or unusable scroll bars due to too much data on the page at once. Alan PS: These are personal opinions of course. michael milewski wrote: > at 50:25 and (51:15 look at apple store) > > Joe mentioned that apple.com went away from pagination and instead > went for 1 big long page which updated as you scrolled and you had a > small scroll bar which you can drag to the appropriate part of the > page. This was mentioned as a preferred design solution with the help > of engineering to make it possible. This did not seem to be the case a > few days ago (I swear June 19th 2009 I saw pagination) at the moment > there is no pagination but there is no long list either as everything > get's filtered by selections on the left hand side. > > As the company I work for is looking at a design around a similar > problem, I was wandering if there is a definite usability answer, > should it be 1 long page or pagination or is the next step to filter > by facets on the left hand navigation. > > cheers Michael > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
