Re: Scrolling vs. Paging

> 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.

This is only true when using regular ol' scrolling, or shorter sets of
results (like 10, as Google offers). If you're talking about the
new-fangled "infinite scrolling", however, where results continually
load into the page as you continue scrolling, then I'd have to say
this is wrong. From what I've seen:

1) Users have a very difficult time re-finding results they've already
scrolled past
2) They prefer pagination, because if it ain't Google, it sucks
3) They often become annoyed by the endless scrolling. They expect to
see a link to go to another page, and they expect to at least get to
the bottom of the page. They also often believe that the page simply
hasn't finished loading yet, which makes it far slower than Google.

> 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.

Agreed. Speed is by far the most important factor for search results pages.

-r-

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