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Add a "More Results" button to the bottom of an incomplete list?

Joe Frayne

July 21, 2009 19:14

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I find myself frequently not realizing that there are more pages to a list of entities, despite the "Page 1 of x" message that comes up, and the page navigation bar at the bottom. For some reason, when I scroll to the bottom and there's nothing more, I think "that's all there is."

There are probably many ways to address this that would help, but one idea that I thought would not only address the problem, but might also be a cool new feature, would be to add a "More Results" button to the bottom, such that it will append the next set to the bottom of the list, rather than just clear the currently loaded results and display the next set of results on a new page.

What do you think?

Joe

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7 comments

• 0
  
  KP July 21, 2009 20:22

  Hey Joe,

  Interesting idea. One of the challenges this presents is the weight of the page. We use paging to make sure the page load and functions are snappy and work well within the browser. The more records you load on a page the heavier the page becomes and the more it can lag. If you had a page loading 100 results and added 100 more, and so on, it could get weighted down quite a bit.

  That said, if we did do something like that, would you keep the paging options as well? If you were paging by 25 results and you added another 25 to the page, then you decided to use the paging controls, would you then expect the next page to show 50 results or start back at 25?

  Maybe this is just a usability issue with making it clearer the displayed records are only a subset of the complete results. How would we call that out better? If we just had "More Results" as a button at the bottom, how would that stand out above what we currently have? We're open to ideas...

  
  cheers,
  kp

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  Joe Frayne July 21, 2009 21:21

  Hey Kevin,

  Yes, I can see that the page would get heavier. I'll just throw out some wacky solutions I just thought up, for the purpose of brainstorming.

  Perhaps you could configure it so that there is an "initial" page size of , say, 25, and a "max" page size of say, 100? So I can load the first 25 very quickly, and then incrementally load 1-50, and then 1-75, and then 1-100, but after that, it would start dropping off the results, showing 26-125, then 51-150, etc?

  I would say that if you then clicked the "Next" button (which I think you should still keep) then it would display the next results on a fresh page using the original configuration (in this case 151-200.) But the other idea is kind of interesting, so maybe it could be configurable.

  But you're right, the key issue for me is that I don't realize there are more pages, and those features might be overkill. My eyes are trained on the bottom of the list as I'm scrolling, and I think a good solution for me would be to have some sort of button, or message, or indication that there are more results, come into view at the bottom of the list when I scroll past the last result on the page.

  Another idea is to have the navigation buttons be more visible, perhaps placing them at all four corners of the page...

  Thanks!

  Joe

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  Gavin Greenwalt July 23, 2009 22:21

  Slashdot ?3.0? has a new system where when you reach the bottom of the page you can expand the page after a short AJAX background load.

  
  I posted some thoughts on this matter on another thread as well so I'll skip duplicating them:

  https://shotgunsoftware.zendesk.com/forums/31278/entries/44778

  But in general there needs to be a more clear indication that more pages exist.  I often don't realize I'm at the end of a page and not just the data.

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  Susan Standen August 12, 2009 00:32

  For production it is often the case that "All Results" need to be loaded to manage scheduling & gantts across tasks, artists, assets, etc. Even though we often change the results from 25 through to All Results, to manage the huge loads, it would be a huge benefit to SG users if you guys could put the work into making All Results load faster in the browser. I realise it is a big call though. Is there a browser other than Firefox that SG is better optimised for?

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  David Pelle August 20, 2009 14:10

  Hello,

  I agree with Susan about the need for Production to see all the results and on my side it's quite long to load if it doesn't crash firefox...

  Is there a way when you request "all results" to export all results in a cvs file without loading all the results in the navigator page? For me it would be very usefull for exemple to rename a task in all the shots...

  Thanks guys.

  
  David.

   

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  Isaac Reuben August 20, 2009 17:24

  David, when you export to CSV it actually does export *all* results that match the query -- not just the page you're on -- so for your use case it should be working the way you want (you don't need to show all results first in order to export them all).

  We're definitely working on getting more results to display efficiently in the browser though, and the latest browsers (Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) do help here.  But there will always be some limit to how many can be displayed at once (and some of our clients have 100's of thousands of tasks!), so will need paging for that and need to make sure using it is intuitive.  Thanks for the feedback everyone!

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  David Pelle August 20, 2009 17:54

  Thanks Isaac!

  In fact, I always tried to load all the results before exporting...i should have thought about this.

  Thanks a lot.

  david