Design Pattern: Pagination with useful hovering indicators
Lots of websites that have catalogs use pagination. This makes sense, as it makes the content fit on the screen and it saves resources on the server. Personally, I hate pagination. I much prefer sites where you can scroll down and new content is automatically loaded. Smart, sexy, elegant. But suppose the items are ordered by price and the first 200 items are outside of the user's budget. Suddenly pagination makes sense as the user wants to skip a lot of items. The thing is, the user has no clue on which page the items that he/she can afford start, so most users will use a simple binary search that takes them on average O(log n) time. This is quite irritating. Each step takes about 3 seconds (click, fetch the page, inspect prices) and there are log n steps, where n is the number of pages. I thought this process could be greatly improved by showing the price range on each page in a popup hint simply by hovering. Implemented at: www.datnarrenschip.com As you can see: the users ...