Progressive disclosure of pagination
Today I browsed Facebook killing time and looking for some old time UTS friends.
Facebook immediately figured what I was up to and prompted me with a search feature to find my old uni friends who graduated in 2006.
Nice - I thought and I clicked on to find myself on the following serp...
I didn't notice the "...over 500 people" counter on the top left as my eyes briskly fixated on the top right pagination controls (a natural, maybe subconscious user reaction on every result page - quickly find # of pagination sets to gauge if your search is likely to be easy or needle-in-haystack one).
I've figured - "oh ok, only three pages? ok, I can afford that".
Having skipped to the next page, I saw this
and then this....
And it kept growing till I think 26.
I don't know if progressive disclosure of pagination numbers is something new, but it's definitely a smart strategy.
For starters, it's cleaner and takes less real estate. Secondly, it elegantly reduces the psychological stress triggered by looking at something like this...
"Prev 1 2 ... 25 26 Next". <-- it yells - We have a gazillion results, you sure you have time to go through all that.
Put it this way. If the first serp opened up with a format displaying the entire set up to 26, like I've shown just now, I'd have never clicked on to the second page, since my perceived chance of coming across a friendly face in the crowd of over 500 folks was close to null.
Well done facebook UX team. Now, take it one step further and move the "...over 500 people" to the very bottom of the page.
5 comments
Jul 19, 2010
Paul Olyslager said...
Very interesting post. I always get a bit disappointed when I see the amount of results on the SERP's of Google for example. Knowing that it is possible to view hundreds of pages, I'm reluctant to navigate through more than 5 of them because they're just too many of them. A better search query would help out, narrowing down the results but you still end up with endless results.
If you show a minimum amount of result pages, I wouldn't feel that overwhelming and before you know it I'm looking at page 10.
Jul 20, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
Thanks for your comment Paul. That's exactly right. I've seen myself caught in this trap, despite great amount of professional skepticism towards solutions like that.
Oct 15, 2010
Scott Herring said...
One other thing that helps is to place the count adjacent to the pagination buttons. You missed it because it was misplaced in the upper left. I've always put the numbers with the control so the eye looks in one place.
Oct 15, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
hmmm, still I think there's a case for keeping these two separately as long as the count number is ridiculously large and we don't want to scare people away. In some cases I'd even drop the number entirely just to engage the user more. See, what's the purpose in showing user that we've just shown him 399899 results. It's like saying: go search for a needle in a haystack. Manipulative? depending how you look at it :)
Jan 07, 2011
Marek said...
Well its sort of like they open a door just slightly, so you aren't freaked out. But is it ethical? In many cases UX has to be worked into the usability.. we still want to look for classmates, so from UX perspective its very clever.. and improves and makes you "road" to finding classmates more enjoyable. So usability is addressed.. and so is ux.
