Michael and Chris, thanks for slogging through the clip. I think it really tied the story together

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/

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.

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.