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Paging Data - Usability Next/Previous Links 2

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Borvik

Borvik

Programmer
Jan 2, 2002
1,392
US
When paging data, and displaying Next/Previous links - from a usability standpoint where should those links be placed? Above the data, below the data, perhaps both?

I know there is a debate on the usability of even having next/previous paging - (ie AJAX scrolling via a LiveGrid type grid). I'm already dismissing the idea - I do NOT want to rely on JavaScript for functionality, as it can be turned off. I'm not opposed to JavaScript to enhance functionality, but it needs to degrade gracefully. This leaves me with either loading ALL the records (not going to happen as it's a rather large dataset), or using a paging method - you can see which I chose.

So - usability-wise, where should the links go?

Thanks.
 
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I'd say below and above the results. That way, Users can navigate from either point in the page.

Leave them just on top, and user's would have to scroll back up to move to the next page. Which is not as intuitive as just clicking on a next button after you've read through the page.

Then you want to have them on top, in case a user wants to just skip over the entire page without reading the contents. That way they don;t need to scroll down to find the link.




----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
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vacunita said:
I'd say below and above the results.
Click to expand...
That's what I always do as well. If you know the page is always short (i.e. won't have scrollbars in most browsers), you could do one or the other.

Greg
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. Kierkegaard
 
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Thanks guys - that's what I had been doing, I just wanted to know what others thought about that and usability.

Just FYI - I'm using two different pagers - both being output (both above and below the data - so four next/previous buttons). First set is Digg style and non-javascript compatible. The second set is a slider, and relies on javascript. This second set is hidden by default using CSS. After the page is output, javascript hides the digg style set, and makes the slider set visible.

Cheers.
 
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Something else you might consider doing - if practical - is adding some <link> elements to the page <head> indicating the next/previous/first/last pages in the sequence:
Code: 
<link rel="next" href="page6.htm" title="Next page" />
<link rel="last" href="page99.htm" title="Last page" />
<link rel="prev" href="page4.htm" title="Previous page" />
<link rel="first" href="page1.htm" title="First page" />
People can have plug-ins (e.g this one for FF)on their browsers that look for elements like this and present appropriate navigation controls. It may also make your site more accessible to some assistive technology.

Obviously it's a lot less important than on-screen links, but if you're working out the URLs anyway, why not do it?


-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd
 
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Thanks for the feature idea Chris.

I'll try to keep that in mind to add later (right now I just want to get parametric searching working, seeing as paging is now working).
 
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