Poll: Pagination Features

[jlizarraga]

Hi all,

Looking to collect some feedback from developers/designers on the usefulness of a couple different pagination features. If you’re unsure what I mean by pagination, skim the images in this SEOmoz article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-b … experience

In this context, I’m referring to paginating a list of search results, like from Google or a shopping website.

The following are the features that can be included in a pagination interface, from most to lease used (based on my research):

• Numbered links to other pages. (4 5 6 7 8, etc.)[/*:m]
• Next and previous page links. (< Previous Page, Next Page >)[/*:m]
• First and last page links. (<< First Page, Last Page >>)[/*:m]
• Information about the current page number and total number of pages. (Page 1 of 12)[/*:m]
• Jump to page X control. (ie. text input or dropdown for jumping to a specific page)[/*:m][/list:u]

  Note the bolded (last two) features above. I have seen these two features before, but they seem to be very rarely used. Yesterday I checked out dozens of different shopping/inventory systems, and didn’t find a single instance of their use.

  As you can probably guess, the client wants these two rare pagination features in their search module, but they are really cluttering up the interface! I’m of the opinion that they don’t offer any extra usability for the user whatsoever. Knowing what page you are on and how many results there are is important, but as a user I don’t need to know the total number of pages. Likewise, I don’t think I would ever need to jump to a specific page as a user. This might be useful for the seller/client if there is a specific search and corresponding page they want to show a customer, but even then it would only be useful for 24 hours as the product inventory changes everyday.

  However, I don’t want to discount these features just because I can’t think of a practical use for them – maybe there is value to these features that I’m not seeing. So the question is:

  
  Do you see any value to the end-user in these rare pagination features? If so, please give an example of how it might be useful.

  Thanks. :)

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