Points on usability: eliminate pagination
Feb 18, 2010
Is pagination good usability? Obviously it depends on the use, but from a user experience view it’s generally not good usability. So why is it so common?
Ads: The more pages of content you are forced to cycle through, the more ads you are served. This is the reason articles are infuriatingly broken into multiple pages. Good from a business sense, perhaps, but certainly not good for user experience.
Legacy: When people still accessed the Internet with 2,400 baud modems, pages loaded so slowly it made sense to break content into easily downloaded chunks. Once it became ingrained that pagination was good usability, it somehow got lost that average Internet speeds are hundreds of times faster now. If your only reason for breaking content into numbered pages is download speed or tradition, you’re probably better off with the content on one page.
Laziness: Organizing information well can be challenging, and good information architects aren’t easy to find. Templated blogging platforms reinforce this bad usability with their architecture designed to accommodate any content while excelling at none. Far more useful than a link at the end of a post to an “older post” is a list of similar, relevant articles.
Disregard: If a website provides a service no one else does, it can survive for a time ignoring how people actually use their data. If users are trying to compare items in a list, or have the ability to resort tables based on different headings, you probably shouldn’t be paginating.
Scale: Sometimes there is just too much content to architect well, like Google search results, and the effort becomes pushing as much relevant information as possible to the first page. Though the other pages become unnecessary, they are still better ways to present this information, like loading in new content when the user scrolls to the bottom of the screen. Cooliris is a dramatic display of how much better image searches could be without pagination.
A caveat in conclusion: test with your users. Pagination may be greatly overused, but it still has its place, so think critically about why you’re using it and evaluate if it really is adding more than it’s detracting from the user experience.
Jesse
Feb 18, 2010 19:03
The ‘page’ metaphor is a powerful one, and I disagree that ‘download speed / tradition’ are the only reasons it’s still around. Splitting content into easily digestible (and easily referenced) chunks is cognitively satisfying.
The current alternatives to pagination have not succeeded (yet) in providing a sense of firm footing to the average user. Dynamically loaded content and endless scrolling often lacks methods of permalinking and bookmarking, which are both obvious strengths of pagination and dedicated-view content.
Levi Myers
Feb 19, 2010 17:13
Pagination definitely has a place. Something that I should clarify is that I’m solely referring to numbered pagination.
I absolutely agree that it’s important for most types of content to be broken into manageable, easily referenced chunks. Part of my point about lazy information architecture is that content often can be broken into named, organized pages with some thought, but is too often thrown into a list of numbered pages. This serves to make the content per page manageable, but completely fails at making the pages easy to reference.
For other types of content, there needs to be more thought into when to use pagination, and how much content to put on a page—a corollary to my thoughts in this article is that when pagination is necessary, it’s often broken into chunks that are aggravatingly small. Pagination is probably the best UI for search results, but what’s the ideal number of listings per page? Google, for instance, defaults to a mere 10 listings per page, relying on the accuracy of their search algorithm to keep most users’ searches within those 10 results, and their statistics no doubt bear out that this is the most common user behaviour. My own use certainly does. Other factors like the poor styling and differentiation between their results affect the readability of longer lists. And of course, Google has additional incentive to keep lists shorter since it results in lower bandwidth use.
Again, I’m not opposed to pagination, I’m opposed to its overuse.
Harley
Feb 22, 2010 12:25
Hey Levi –
A good post regarding pagination and it’s appropriate usage. I’ve never been a fan of pagination but understand that it has it’s place when the circumstances are appropriate and it benefits the user experience. It’s use should be carefully considered. There are many ways to style content that can make it engaging to scroll through without requiring pagination and I admire those designers that can accomplish this. The user experience should be considered in tandem with the technical challenges to try find a suitable approach. Usability is something I have had on the brain lately so I invite you to check out my recent blog post regarding it’s importance: http://harleyrivet.com/2010/02/15/usability-were-all-still-kids-at-heart/
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