[IxDA Discuss] Pagination

[Dan Brown]

Far be it for me to start a controversy, but pagination seems more
necessary evil than useful interaction element. While I appreciate the
depth of thought that goes into these analyses, but I'd be more
interested in seeing examples of *meaningful* navigation for a a group
of items of a particular type.

A "page" in a list of results is a more-or-less artificial grouping of
items. Those items at the top of the list -- presumably on the first
page -- are judged by the underlying alogrithm to be the Most
Important.

But, who are we kidding?

While the examples provided in this thread have been exemplary, they
all seem to break down when facing large numbers of items because
"page 27" just isn't meaningful to people when their looking for
something in a list.

For a previous job, I looked into alternate methods for navigating
long lists of items. Flickr (at the time) provided an interesting
paradigm in their Organizr -- the timeline, which displayed a bar
chart of photos uploaded over time. You could move sliders around to
zero-in on a particular time. Long list of items, meaningful
one-dimensional navigation. I extended the idea in my particular case
to allow users to navigate by longitude. (This may seem a little
crazy, but it was actually a meaningful dimension to our target
audience.)

Thought exercise: take a group of items you're dealing with and
identify a meaningful single dimension along which users might
navigate... Selling clothing online? Maybe users can walk along a
spectrum of colors (or use a slider control to zero-in on preferred
colors)...

So, will pagination become increasingly irrelevant, or am I just fooling myself?

-- Dan


On 6/22/07, Chris Pallé <chris.palle at blueflameinteractive.com> wrote:
> Not sure if anyone else posted this, but I thought it had some good
> observations:
>
> http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2007/06/22/pagination-101
>

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