05
Apr
Apr
Pagination done right
You might have noticed dzone has just undergone a facelift. Looks great, but above all I love their new auto-pagination feature. Basically, once you scroll far enough down their list of developer links, it expands in place using an Ajax request. The end result is a bottomless pit of development links, and it’s so well executed, you might have never noticed it.
My question is, why haven’t I seen more of this?
See also: Endless Pageless: No More Next Page
Commentary
I think the technique has a place, but I’d hate to see it become trendy, the way other Ajax techniques like “live search” were. IMHO, there are some serious usability problems: chief among them that it undermines URL-addressability for things like bookmarks.
Anyway, you can see a similar effect on Google’s searchmash.com—and I’ll admit, it is awfully fun to just keep hitting the spacebar to get endless search results.
Agreed Raymond, it’s no silver bullet. I think what really got me excited was that I had been using the feature inadvertently for days before even noticing it.
Thanks for pointing out searchmash.com, btw – hadn’t come across it before.
I hate it – breaks the internet. Why? No way of copy-pasting a link.
I’m not a fan of it. I was on dzone a couple days ago and wanted to search for something that I knew was on the homepage recently, but CTRL+F won’t find the text that hasn’t been loaded yet.
And there’s no next/prev navigation so I could easily see content that was recently on the homepage. Rather than seeing the typical:
and clicking “4”, I had to keep scrolling to the bottom, waiting for the load, then scroll down to the bottom again.
A minor annoyance maybe, but breaks expected behavior.
For bookmark sites like DZone or Reddit, I’d really prefer pagination. If you come back to find an article, you could just click on page ‘10’ instead of scrolling endlessly until you find it.
But I guess you could also use the search feature if you remember the name of the article =P