Pagination Standards

Question

Does anyone know of a defined standard for Pagination? We have a consultant company that buildt a website for us and part of the site has a list of items that uses pagination. They have a pretty standard pagination layout consisting of two buttons on either side of a list of numbers (links).

[<<]  [<]   1   2   3   4   5   [>]  [>>]

The buttons [<] and [>] move you through the pages, either back on or forward one. THe numbers are all direct links to the pages.

The problem I have is with the buttons with the double 'arrows'. I think these should take you to the First or Last page. Everyone here agrees with that and expect it to work that way. However, the company that has designed the site has those buttons jumping 10 pages forward or backwards. I"ve never seen this done like this, and so the expected behavior isn't what myself and other users are expecting. This site just went live last night and we've already had 3 users report this functionality as a bug.

Is there a set of standards I can use for this to show the consultants? They don't want to change this functionality.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The problem with pagination standards is the best solution really depends on:

• what it being paginated
• the size of the result set
• the performance and technical feasibility of moving through the result set

In your specific case, I would not expect a double arrow to move 10. This could be more useful than first/last, but the arbitrary 10 value should be displayed to the user in some way.

Here are some UI pagination examples:

• Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices
• Twitter Bootstrap Pagination
• Yahoo Search Pagination

Answer 2

I have never heard of anything like standards but I have always coded it the way you describe. I could see forward 10 being useful if you had a relatively large number of pages but annoying for an extremely large number. However, if you have that many pages, users are unlikely to page through the data anyway. Searching is whats needed in that case. Anyway, a consultant telling you that your are wrong seems like you should be looking for a new consultant. They may disagree (and i could see their side of the argument) but you should have the final say...