18 Mar 2008 2024H

Users strongly prefer ‘View All’

They want to see everything. They don’t mind scrolling; they prefer to scroll than to see pagination. They want it all.

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8 responses to "Users strongly prefer ‘View All’"

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19 Mar 2008 0652H

K writes:

Absolutely. I hate when I’m on a site and it doesn’t have that as option. Even worse? When the site doesn’t even have the option of making the page view more options at a time.

06 Apr 2008 1848H

RC PoP Art writes:

why on earth would someone prefer to see their content broken up into a number of pages? was this a preference to load pages faster back in the old 56k and 28k days we had so many years back? How many people out there are still using dial up? I mean besides the Waltons and Early from the move California?

07 Apr 2008 0553H

Gino writes:

LOL. I know this is a topic that incites arguments, but, it’s curious what people will and will not accept.

As usual, user testing reveals answers we never ever would have seen just by noodling by ourselves. So you have to do usability testing and prototyping and all that stuff upfront so you can see what people feel comfortable with.

07 Apr 2008 1609H

Web Design writes:

Hey Gino. Been in the web design business for a while and something else that surprises me day in and day out, is how everyone has a different like or dislike. I currently have a client that publishes a monthly newsletter that they also want available online for viewing. Originally it was set to specific width options, similar to the main site, but then they wanted readers to have a printer friendly online version that didn’t cut off news items onto next pages. When set-up, there was an issue with whitespace between items. The next month they wanted it changed back and to instead create a PDF version. Once set-up the PDF version took too long to load on dial-up accounts so they scrapped that idea. This most recent month they didn’t like how if a news item title was too long that it broke into two lines so we had to increase the “table” width, but that resulted in cut-off margins again. So we are back to where we started with them…the way I see it, you never truly
satisfy everyone, it’s degrees of satisfaction, or having the majority satisfied at the very least.

07 Apr 2008 1724H

Gino writes:

I feel your pain dude. You are charging them for that rework, right? And they will pay for it?

It sounds like there’s an understanding gap with the client there about what they really want. Sometimes clients will use you like you are their set of hands because “they don’t know how to draw.” That’s a bad situation, and it’s very demoralizing.

Maybe there needs to be some expectation management about roles and responsibilities and maybe there has to be a discussion with them about trusting you to make it work and what the stats are for dialup access in Canada. I think that broadband is even more heavily adopted in Canada than it is here. You may have to fire the client.

People have likes and dislikes, that’s true. In user experience, that’s different from someone being able to accomplish something or understand something on a website and not being able to accomplish or understand how to do something. But for your situation, first, I think, not knowing the whole situation, admittedly, that I would want to bridge the gap with the client by sitting them down and talking out what they really need (as opposed to what they want), and how they want it communicated and all that. Maybe you can both set out what the budget is, with stages so either party can jump out if the relationship is not working out, and what the time to execute will be. That way you’re kept honest and so are they. Also that way you’re not spinning your wheels and they’re not burning valuable cash.

At that point once you’ve reached some accord (might want to look at mood boards and design keys), I still think that some kind of prototyping or design mockups, even from a very rough angle, can help you bridge your gap with your client. Good luck.

14 Apr 2008 0316H

Abhishek writes:

I agree with “K”… I hate websites which doesnot have this option.

14 May 2008 1648H

Robert Morgen writes:

I think the pagination is both a hold over of the ‘old days’ and the fact that web designers try to keep clickable info at the top of the page where it gets seen first.

More pages = more views of the ads and newsletter sign up boxes.

Personally I prefer the pagination because it’s easier for people to work with bite sized chunks, but I would like to see some test data about it.

I can also see a good argumant for view all.

14 May 2008 1657H

Gino writes:

The thing I left out is, I have now observed this behavior, “view all” in user testing with at least three separate, different, large (millions of users) ecommerce/online retail websites. It should be elevated to the level of convention.

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