Re: Scrolling vs. Paging

I wanted to take a minute and thank everyone for their responses to my
question!  I've received some good proposals for solutions as well as had
myriad situations considered that I had not previously considered.

It seems that most everyone is in favor of some solution that can combine
pagination with scrolling by putting the choice of how many results display
on a page in the control of the user.

Because I do foresee a high number of results appearing depending on the
search term used, I do think it best to have some pagination to avoid the
endless scrolling that Robert describes below and the issues of loading
speed that others of you have raised.

Again, thank you!

Nikki


On 5/21/07 4:41 PM, "Robert Hoekman, Jr." <[email protected]> wrote:

>> 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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