Comments on: Easy as 1,2,3?

By: SEO & Pagination - What is Pagination? | SEO - janet bartoli roussos

SEO & Pagination - What is Pagination? | SEO - janet bartoli roussos — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:36:34 +0000

[...] found a good, plain speaking site that helps describe this a bit further – from David Hamill’s blog and from reading blue acorn’s great technical details – still I think eliminating pagination [...]

By: David Hamill

David Hamill — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:45:29 +0000

Hi Keith, you’re right that providing other facilities for fast information retrieval are important. But you’re assuming that everyone notices them and understands how to use them. This isn’t always the case. If you paginate your results with numbers, a lot of people will assume that this is the way they navigate through them.

The issues you point out are challenges that can be solved, they just require a bit of effort . If I select a month from a date range, the number of results only becomes an issue when it gets too large. I’d rather be able to choose a month than have to guess a number between 2 and 45.

By: Keith Humm

Keith Humm — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:07:41 +0000

Hmm. I agree with a lot of your comments, but think that for the most part they are largely irrelevant.

A lot of people misuse numerical pagination – primarily by not providing other facilities for fast information retrieval. Providing links such as ‘date ranges’ for pagination presents its own issues – the compact form for dates is ambiguous (USA vs. Intl formats) and much, much longer. It’s also difficult to understand exactly how many items per page you will receive etc.

My point, I guess, is that filtering and searching are the important parts that get neglected, not pages as such. Pagination should serve a single purpose: to divide things up into digestible chunks.

Things like date ranges and ABC etc are *filters* and not paginators. They work together.

By: Product filters | Usability Thoughts

Product filters | Usability Thoughts — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:49:13 +0000

[...] was talking the other day about pagination and David Hamill had a point there, those tiny numbers don’t send any message to the user, so what’s the [...]

By: PÃ¤r NystrÃ¶m

PÃ¤r NystrÃ¶m — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:52:52 +0000

I try to decide whether or not to use pagination by the content of the search result…

If the posts are “nominal” (in the meaning unrelated to eachother in their main content) I prefer pagination. Consider Google’s search results: two different posts can have totally unrelated content, although the search algorithm can still sort it by mathematical relevance. But this relevance is not really the relevance of the user.

Also, when the user is not interrested in comparing two posts I like pagination.

If the posts are sortable on the factor that the user is interrested in comparing, I do not use pagination. I use scrollbars or something else to avoid that two interresting posts happen to fall in different pages.

By: Use relevant pagination styles | ux digest

Use relevant pagination styles | ux digest — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:34:17 +0000

[...] Source: Easy as 1, 2, 3? (Good Usability) [...]

By: David Hamill

David Hamill — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:10:02 +0000

Hi Chris. Good point but your database design shouldn’t dictate the user experience. It should be the other way round. I get your point about page load times but one 3 second page can provide a better user experience than 3 split second page loads. After all, your user needs to digest each of those pages only to discover that they need to try the next page.

By: Chris Cohen

Chris Cohen — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:56:50 +0000

An interesting approach, but in a situation where you advocate showing everything on one page instead of paginating, the load on the server will increase dramatically, both in terms of bandwidth and processing. A 5-page, 10-item-per-page display then becomes 50 items on one page.

I like the idea of alphabetical presentation, but it’s not as intuitive from a database design point of view. You would potentially need to change the indexes on the database table to make this efficient, and then cater for things like products starting with the word ‘the’ to avoid them all getting clumped in the ‘T’ section.

By: Linkit 20.2. - 20.2. | Valontuoja

Linkit 20.2. - 20.2. | Valontuoja — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:38:02 +0000

[...] Good Usability » Easy as 1,2,3? Using 1,2,3 links is often a result of lazy web design. In many cases, it’s the web equivalent of asking your users to rake through bargain bins. They don’t know what’s in each bin, they have to rummage through them in order to find out. 20. Helmikuu 2009 ( 1 minuuttia sitten ) – Linkit [...]

By: Thomas | Santhos Webdesign

Thomas | Santhos Webdesign — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:22:18 +0000

Excellent article! I’ve also been very surprised by the way Hotmail deals with it… Should expect more from such a company…

I think when it’s used numerical, you’d almost better NOT do it… As you mentioned, finding some particular date or something… which number to choose? Always need a couple of attempts… Why not place everything in one large list?

Take a look at Outlook for instance. Why isn’t it used there?? Everyone on this planet is scrolling through a long list of mails. Me too and I don’t mind. So why should it be different on the web?

Alphabetical is another thing, because you KNOW where to click.