Mobile Design Pattern: Paging
This design pattern is part of the Mobile Design Patterns series.
A systematic technique of arranging content of a long page over a number of numbered webpages is known as Paging.
- Gives the users advance information of the quantity of the content.
Many times the content of the page is too long, ever-scrollable in other words. The users need to look for something specific in a huge list of items. For example, search results, available jobs, shopping items, etc were there are numerous results available . To avoid the user ever scrolling in such conditions the content is systematically classified according to relevance, name, type, price, etc. and presented to the user in the form of multiple webpages.
As shown in the below screenshots, only part of the results are provided on the current webpage. The navigation links to the other lists of results or next pages are located at the top and/or bottom of the page. It is generally a practice to provide these navigation links both at the top and bottom of the webpage for the convenience of the user.
Depending upon the number of other results available, the navigation links are numbered. For example when the results are very large the links are available for "1-10" pages, while when the results are comparatively low less number of navigation links are shown. Ref fig.
The navigation links are generally page numbers, as shown in the above screenshots. However, when mobilizing a website - due to less screen resolution resulting in less space - the page numbers tend to be very small. A special design which has links "Show next 10 results" and "Show previous 10 results" may be used.
- As per the availability of screen space and the size and style of fonts used the navigation buttons may be sometime appear to small. An alternate is using buttons which link to proper navigation links.
- A scroll bar (with a Go button) with navigation links may also be used instead of all visible number links. This may be helpful when the screen space available is small.
--Submitted by croozeus 01:18, 12 May 2009 (EEST)