Other "no paging" suggestions
I had posted a post titled No paging = happier users suggesting leaving all content for example search results in one page other than separating it in pages.
Yesterday Molly the lead of the WaSP and one of the well know experts, has posted a post titled No More Next Page: Embracing the Non-Linear Web talking about the same subject and linking to an article she wrote since July, 2001 titled freedom in structure she also pointed to a post titled Endless Pageless: No More Next Page by Pete Forde he suggests great techniques that could be applied using AJAX that loads some of the remaining content once you get near with your scroll bar to the bottom of the page that you might not notice unless you scrolled to the bottom quickly you will see the message more posts are being loaded...
humanized reader is an example similar to what Pete Forde suggested.
But I still don't know why the need of that why don't you let it all load while the user is checking the first lines?
November 4, 2006, 1:00 PM | Experiments , User experience , Web standards
Comments
1 | November 4, 2006 9:20 PM, Pete Forde said:
Hey there! Good comments..
I think that there are two reasonable responses to your question.
The first is technical: many web applications rely on the document.onload event to fire; it doesn't go off until the browser reports that all of the assets are completely downloaded.
The second is related in that if the page just keeps loading, the spinner will keep going, and I suspect that people would be aware of that - the strong possibility would exact that a person finds that disconcerting.
A bonus third reason is that on a high traffic site, it makes sense to only load the content you need. Just loading more and more content would break caching, and plus the scrollbar would keep moving and shrinking.
I really think that people often wait for pages to load before they start touching things; there's an unspoken brittleness for the onload state of things that people seem to patiently wait for.
Anyhow, there's still TONS of room for iteration on this pattern. I've already got ideas for how to support bookmarks and disabled javascript.
2 | November 4, 2006 11:18 PM, Abdelrahman Osama said:
About the first point if the app developer choose to follow this strategy he will not depend on document.onload.
About the second point It's the user fault but we can't point fingers on the user so this is a good point.
And about the third I think the cache problem could be solved by script but the scroll one can't because it will be confusing so this may be a point too.
Any way any thing in it's first stages will be strange to the users but if it's the right thing it will take it's time for the user to get used to like any standard.
For those points you mentioned the technique you suggested is great if it will save us from using paging.
Thanks Pete for your comments, I really appreciate your time.