Re: Scrolling vs. Paging

I don't know of research but here's my opinion.

Scrolling is a lot easier to use.  Period.  It's much better to have
everything available and just be able to scroll up and down than to have
to go through the information page by page.

The one area where paging is better is:  suppose there might be a long
list, and delivering it to the client might take a long time, say more
than a minute.  For performance reasons you might decide to break the
information up into pages and deliver one page at a time.  This
inconveniences the user, but it gives the impression that the
application is being responsive.

So I'd say that if you are worried about the performance issue, and if
in fact it would be a lot faster to deliver the data one page at a time
(this is true of some apps and not true of others) you might want go go
with the paging.  If performance is not an issue, or would not be
improved by paging, then go with scrolling.

- Mitch Gart
 

-----Original Message-----
From: ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (Open Discussion)
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nikki Roberg
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 10:35 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [CHI-WEB] Scrolling vs. Paging

Hello,

I am currently working on a project in which a part of the interface
will
display search results. This part of the interface will take up about
1/4+
of the screen (if that even matters).

During a group walkthrough with potential users 50% wanted to be able to
scroll through a long list of results and 50% wanted to have the results
paginated with links to the next set of results.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any research (aside from Piolat, A.
Roussey, J-Y., and Thunin, Olivier (1997)) that discusses this issue
and/or
shows that one presentation may be better than another? I would also be
interested in other ways of implementing the design.

Thank you for your help,

Nikki Roberg
Usability & Interface Specialist
Digital Library Program
Indiana University, Bloomington
Bloomington, IN 47405
www.dlib.indiana.edu

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