Literate Web Pages...Don't Break Lists Into Tiny Pages

Don't break lists into excessively short pages.

Don't make it harder and slower for the reader to peruse the data.

Don't break the browser's ability to scroll through the data.

Why Not

It's a heck of a lot easier and faster to scroll in the browser than to go back and forth between multiple web pages.

Details

Consider how easy and fast it is to scroll a web page compared to jumping back and forth between separate web pages.

What does it take to scroll down one pane-full? As little as pushing your finger to roll the mouse wheel.

What does it take to scroll down several times? Pushing your finger just a little more.

What does it take to scroll back up? Just pulling your finger back a bit.

What a "Single Click" Really Entails

Now, what does it take to get to the next page in a broken-up list? A single click? Not quite. The user has to:

1. visually find and identify the link to the next page
   • (If there are no next and previous links but just links like "page 1," "page 2," etc., then the user also has to recognize what the current page number or link is to determine which link is wanted.)
   • (Sometimes the user has to scroll just to expose the next-page link.)
2. move the mouse to put the mouse cursor on the link
3. click
4. wait for the HTTP request and response
5. visually skip over the page header again and find the first list item in the next page
   • Frequently, the user has to scroll down to get unneeded page-header information out of the browser window and get the requested list data into the window.

Note that all that is for only one step. Going forward several pages requires repeating every one of those steps.

Many Ways to Scroll

Recall all the options the user has to scroll vertically in typical browsers:

• press the Page Down and Page Up keys
• press the up and down array key
• press the space bar (space/backspace in Netcape 4.x)
• roll the mouse wheel
• drag the scroll bar slider
• click in the scroll bar background
• click on a scroll bar up/down arrow button

Additional Considerations

Some additional considerations are:

• The browser's "Find in Page" function works when the list is in one page; is doesn't work when the list is broken into multiple pages.
• Breaking a list into, say, 10-item items means that the user can't easily see item 10 and item 11 at the same time. (With an unbroken list, the user can see any N items at a time.)

References

For more information, see: