I'd generally agree that real estate at the top of the page tends to be too valuable to spend on pagination.
Some points: - In e-commerce, pagination tends to be used to a greater degree than the low/1% stat from web search - The #1 use case I've seen for top of page pagination, while working at MSN Search, was to return to page 1 from page 2 after noticing the results were less relevant or uninteresting. The back button works for this too and the controls were little used aside from this situation. We dropped them. I've actually tested top of page pagination in an e-commerce venue by creating a control condition in which the top of page copy was increased in size to maintain the same vertical footprint in a multivariate design that toggled top of page pagination. We found that top pagination added little value to this situation, while screen real estate added consistent value. The copy seemed to effect only a subset of users and thus while positive was not strong enough to warrant giving up vertical real estate. One deep thought on pagination to close: In a talk at Web 2.0 Expo in 2007 I showed a graph from MSN Search in which users click on the numeric links in standard < 1 2 3 4 5 > style pagination to a decreasing amount as the page number increases. I attribute this to user goal differences, "I'm going to check page 2" versus "I'm going to scan these results". hth, Andy On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Michael Caskey <li...@casadev.com> wrote: > Hey Marianne, > > I agree that the content of the first page of results is most important, > since the first page of search results is the only one that is likely to be > used. > > Do we agree that pagination controls usually should only appear at the end > of the first page of results, rather than cluttering the page with controls > that aren't likely to be used? > > Thanks! > > Mike C. > <snip> > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
