Best paging, for mobile?

dalecosp

I'm doing some work on a mobile site/app. It's not locally stored, you have to be connected ... maybe it's not really an app.

I have fairly simple pagination routines on current projects. I can just drag that code into the new work. But that kind of feels dirty.

Also, I recently read that actual studies show that a "Load More" button with lazy loading is a superior implementation for lists of multiple products.

Is that the state-of-the-art? How are you paginating these sorts of results? Any stories to share, recommendations to make?

My mobile code is really clean for the most part and I'm quite proud of it. I'd hate to muck it up with some big mess of code I didn't understand. But if we got results, I might not care. Plus, I guess I could always go back and fix it later ... (does that EVER happen?)

sneakyimp

Can't really say I'm a fan of lazy loading. Finding something you saw previously always requires you to re-load everything and keep scrolling down. However, that's how twitter and facebook do their mobile websites (I refuse to install their apps for privacy reasons).

I do know that ArsTechnica has links to click for 'more' and their articles are usually paged.

I'm facing a paging-type situation on an upcoming site where I must load some 1200 careers. I'm sort of wondering if just loading them all at once will be ok. It's only like 38k with the nice clean markup I have thanks to bootstrap.

Derokorian

sneakyimp;11059549 wrote:
Can't really say I'm a fan of lazy loading. Finding something you saw previously always requires you to re-load everything and keep scrolling down. However, that's how twitter and facebook do their mobile websites (I refuse to install their apps for privacy reasons).

I'm a big fan of lazy-loading and/or infinite scrolling (2 different things btw), however for usability it really needs to be done properly. For example, the url fragment should include a page number, as if each set of results was on its own page. This way if you click on something and then hit back, you can start where you clicked the thing. I know MOST social networks don't implement it this way, but a lot of other sites do and its very usable that way. I hate trying to find something on fb or twitter if I should accidently click anything. God forbid I clicked a link, now I can't go back to the post i was reading, so damn annoying!

dalecosp

Well, thanks for getting involved in this conversation!

sneakyimp;11059549 wrote:
Can't really say I'm a fan of lazy loading. Finding something you saw previously always requires you to re-load everything and keep scrolling down. However, that's how twitter and facebook do their mobile websites (I refuse to install their apps for privacy reasons).

I'm right next to you in the paranoid corner, under the camouflage netting behind that really big, ugly looking shotgun. Walk over really slowly and don't put your hands behind your back ... it'll be fine. 🙂

I do know that ArsTechnica has links to click for 'more' and their articles are usually paged.

That's an interesting looking implementation. Not sure I find it compelling, though. I didn't find it intuitive. I did like the fact that the back button worked though, something Derokorian mentions below.

I'm facing a paging-type situation on an upcoming site where I must load some 1200 careers. I'm sort of wondering if just loading them all at once will be ok. It's only like 38k with the nice clean markup I have thanks to bootstrap.

Dang new tech. 😉

Derokorian;11059553 wrote:
I'm a big fan of lazy-loading and/or infinite scrolling (2 different things btw), however for usability it really needs to be done properly. For example, the url fragment should include a page number, as if each set of results was on its own page. This way if you click on something and then hit back, you can start where you clicked the thing. I know MOST social networks don't implement it this way, but a lot of other sites do and its very usable that way. I hate trying to find something on fb or twitter if I should accidently click anything. God forbid I clicked a link, now I can't go back to the post i was reading, so damn annoying!

Thanks for that tidbit! I'll want to add that to my ticket for sure. Not sure I'd thought about it.

sneakyimp

Derokorian;11059553 wrote:
I'm a big fan of lazy-loading and/or infinite scrolling (2 different things btw), however for usability it really needs to be done properly. For example, the url fragment should include a page number, as if each set of results was on its own page. This way if you click on something and then hit back, you can start where you clicked the thing. I know MOST social networks don't implement it this way, but a lot of other sites do and its very usable that way. I hate trying to find something on fb or twitter if I should accidently click anything. God forbid I clicked a link, now I can't go back to the post i was reading, so damn annoying!

To each his own. I'm going to double down on my distaste for it. It's so rarely well implemented. It also often comes at the expense of page footers with handy information like TOS or 'contact us' or 'support' -- you could move those into a menu at the top I suppose.

Something just seems suspect to me when you visit a feed and there's no concept of paging and the feed is mutable and the sequence or content of it may change. Personally, I think it's a gimmick which intentionally causes visitors to get "lost" so they have to browse the site more (thereby viewing more ads). Imagine a retail store where the shelves are constantly moving around unpredictably.

The benefit? No need to click 'next' button I guess.