If Your Content Has a Beginning, Middle, and End, Use Pagination
Continuing from #23, Use “Infinite Scroll” For Feed–Style Content Only, a paginated, multi-page list may seem “old school” but it has a few major benefits:
- It’s goal-oriented, so the user is trying to find the item they need in a list and pagination feels intuitive, instead of having to search through an endless list
- It remembers the user’s position and displays the current page to them
- It conveys a beginning, middle, and end to the content
- Users can use the scroll bar to navigate the page and they can reach the footer if they need to
If the user sees that there are “9,999 pages,” then they can choose to use a search, sort, or filter control. They can’t make that choice if they have no idea how many pages there may be.
Figure 24.1: A great paginator
Show the user the current page, some pages before...
