I have been one of the earliest, loudest, and most consistent PITA's about
pagination, so I probably oughta speak up. I would like to state three facts:
1. Marker + limit (e.g. forward-only) pagination is horrific for building a
user interface.
2. Pagination doesn't scale.
3. OpenStack's APIs have historically had useless filtering capabilities.
In a world where pagination is a "must-have" feature we need to have page
number + limit pagination in order to build a reasonable UI. Ironically though,
I'm in favor of ditching pagination altogether. It's the lowest-common
denominator, used because we as a community haven't buckled down and built
meaningful ways for our users to get to the data they really want.
Filtering is great, but it's only 1/3 of the solution. Let me break it down
with problems and high level "solutions":
Problem 1: I know what I want and I need to find it.
Solution: filtering/search systems.
Problem 2: I don't know what I want, and it may or may not exist.
Solution: tailored discovery mechanisms.
Problem 3: I need to know something about *all* the data in my system.
Solution: reporting systems.
We've got the better part of none of that. But I'd like to solve these issues.
I have lots of thoughts on all of those, and I think the UX and design
communities can offer a lot in terms of the usability of the solutions we come
up with. Even more, I think this would be an awesome working group session at
the next summit to talk about nothing other than "how can we get rid of
pagination?"
As a parting thought, what percentage of the time do you click to the second
page of results in Google?
All the best,
- Gabriel
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