11 ms·

Stop Pagination Now

189 points by zonotope 14y ago

zalew 14y ago
hey, nobody beats Polish newspapers http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,6071889,Teraz_go_zarymuje.html http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,6071889,Teraz_go_zarymuje.html check out the pagination
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Good grief.
mfincham 14y ago
Much bigger sin: Boing Boing style "endlessly load more content with Javascript" nonsense. If you're browsing on an (arguably flawed in its implementation) iOS device where page state gets unexpectedly dumped all the time (e.g, tab switching, browser crashes, "multitasking" switches out to an IM client), this style of "pagination" is utterly pants. I end up having to manually edit the URL to advance through content like Boing Boing and Tumblr just to be sure that when Safari or Chrome inevitably next dump my page state I won't have to start from the very top again.
- krogsgard 14y ago
  Yeah, paginating articles and paginating archives are two totally different things. Paginating articles (as the article linked describes) is not a good user experience. But not paginating archives, otherwise known as endless scrolling, in my opinion, is not good.
  - cheald 14y ago
    Endless scrolling can work if you use it in conjunction with replaceState to make sure that the URL reflects that the user is looking at. Outside of that, though, definitely annoying.
- machrider 14y ago
  Yeah, I can't stand infinite scroll pages. It becomes impossible to pass a link to someone to a specific section of entries. It generally breaks the back button -- when I click a link and then go back to an infinite scroll page, it has dropped all the dynamic content and has to reload it, and then I have to scroll back to where I was (which may have involved several minutes of scrolling and loading content). Perhaps it's irrational, but it also frustrates me that such pages have no bottom. I think people got used to a model of a page where it has a top and a bottom, and now it's a bit weird to interact with. One of my favorite examples is Facebook's implementation, which leaves several useful navigation links in the page footer. These links taunt you as you tried to scroll to reach them, only to have more news content appear in your view and push the footer off screen again. (I think they've since duplicated those footer links in other locations so you can reach them, but it doesn't change the fact that this broken UI model presents options and then sucks them away before you can click on them.)
  - darkstalker 14y ago
    Infinite scroll pages are harder to read with a pointing device withouth a scroll wheel, because the scroll bar jumps randomly when reaching the bottom.
- mfincham 14y ago
  Boing Boing at least have fixed this. Even though the page still scrolls forever, at the bottom of each "segment" the "Older Entries" link no longer disappears when the additional content loads, allowing for optional pagination :)
di 14y ago
But of course, even this article itself is paginated. Perhaps ironically, but still.
- krogsgard 14y ago
  If you read even a little bit of the article, you'll see it's Slate's policy to do so. But even then, if you click the next page, he just completes the joke he made in the article.
  - fletchowns 14y ago
    Poor guy couldn't even get through the first sentence before he felt the urge to try to impress us all with his keen observation.
tnuc 14y ago
Article on single page. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/website_pagination_stories_should_load_into_a_single_page_every_time_.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/...
- ynniv 14y ago
  ... but you'll miss the joke on page 2
  - bockris 14y ago
    Which reinforces his point for me. I didn't visit the 2nd page due to apathy.
djloche 14y ago
>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page." As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not. Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in making $) significant time and $ A/B testing various levels of pagination such that their sites are optimized so that there are just fewer pages than their readership is unwilling to tolerate. The end result is that their sites are optimized to make the most amount of money. If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it. Of course, there are copycats that don't do the testing, don't optimize for their niche of readers, and are probably losing both money and readers because of it. We can argue about publications adopting different business models, but that's a different story. Advertisers pay a premium for engaged, targeted niche audiences that match their products/services. That's the reality of the online advertising market.
- 0r3jq4a0j 14y ago
  If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it. I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case. If you look at Plotz's comment, it's exactly what most editors will say: Pages that run too long can irritate readers. We run stories of 2,000, 4,000, even 6,000 words, and to run that much text down a single page can daunt and depress a reader. So pagination can make pages seem more welcoming, more chewable. They really believe this. It's important to realize that despite all the buzz about A/B testing in the industry, editors pretty universally believe they don't need to validate their opinions through testing. Why not? Because though school and their careers they've been told that their opinions matter, and, in fact, that's all their job really is: voicing opinions and making judgements, because they believe they have special insight into what readers want. Look no further than Poltz, a writer and editor with no software design or development experience, who somehow believes he's qualified to make that statement.
  - joshuarrrr 14y ago
    I'll ignore your general disdain for writers and editors, and point out that not all readers want the same thing. I've pushed for non-paginated articles at my publication, but I admit that I'm not always happy with the result, and we do hear reader complaints about not being able to orient themselves in an article like this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmological-supercomputer http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmolog... (hopefully a wider content-well after an upcoming redesign will help) I'm curious to hear what people think of a hybrid pagination system, like that currently used by Computing Now magazine. I like that it gives the user a sense of the article length without interrupting the flow of reading. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/careers/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=transitioning-from-software-to-software-assurance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/careers/cont...
SjuulJanssen 14y ago
Autopatchwork rocks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeolcjbaammbkgaiagooljfdepnjmkfd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeol...
- mushishi 14y ago
  I wish it worked. I actually browsed through Postgresql documentation last night, and thought this kind of a thing would be useful as it is paginated into a lot of subsections. But the plugin didn't seem to have any effect. edit: Within minutes it has shown to be useful on other sites. Thanks for the suggestion.
  - SjuulJanssen 14y ago
    It depends on whether the page uses rel="next"
ps2000 14y ago
Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading. Pagination is better than no navigation, this is why Google Image Search is weird to navigate. The absence of proper pagination may be even the reason Google Wave has found no friends beyond its believers. Pagination sucks when text length per page is too short and even more when 50% of the content consists of advertisements. I avoid such websites.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  > Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading. That's why some people tend to select and highlight random bits of text while reading. It's not always because they're just fidgety :)
bobsy 14y ago
As soon as I hit a page with multiple pages I almost always lose interest and immediately leave. I can read down a single page. However when I see an article with 6 pages I am like ... ... sod that. Its not so much the reading. Its the slow page loading which gets me down. If people did pagination right with ajax preloading the next page then I would be happy. 99% of sites do not do this. Instead their sites are slow because they have to load a bunch of third party ad's. Moving from page to page when each page takes 2-3 seconds to load kills the reading experience. A Wired article featured on HN recently. I don't remember what it was about but it had a gallery on it. You would think in today's day and age when you click the thumbnail the main image would change. On this wired story no.. the whole page reloaded. Due to third party ad's each page load took ages. The page didn't bounce down to where the image should show. While I thought the topic was interesting the user experience was so terrible I abandoned it. If you are going to force pagination on readers then have a single page option. Preferably at the top of the article. This way you cater for everyone.
- jaxonrice 14y ago
  Most Wired articles that contain galleries have a 'view all' link to a page that has all of the gallery images on it. The link isn't well signposted but the resulting page offers a far better reading experience.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Use something like readability or open all the pages in background tabs (ctrl-click) before you get to the end of page 1. I almost never read long articles to the end, unless I've added them to readability. If I can't open them in the background so they're loaded when I want them, I usually don't bother
- noselasd 14y ago
  I always look for the "Print" button on such pages - as that shows the content on a single page. If there's no Print option, I'm not bothering reading the thing, unless it contains info I absolutely need.
- re_todd 14y ago
  I think you've hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking the same thing last week, wondering why I hate pagination when I used to like it. I realized it's the time it takes to load, which is probably due to the ads. I'm on a broadband cable connection, and some of the sites take 5-10 seconds to load the next page. One popular site a few days ago took 15 seconds to load the next page. Maybe I have a neighbor hogging cable bandwidth, but still the pages with 3rd party ads are noticeably worse.
sethbannon 14y ago
There goes Business Insider's business model.
pinchyfingers 14y ago
No, they should continue paginating because most readers will just click to the second page and Slate will increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that Slate has tested this and found it to be true. If there was something different they could do to increase ad views, they'd be doing that instead.
- pinchyfingers 14y ago
  How is this down voted? Is it not a valid comment that could lead to a meaningful discussion? Stop being tree-hugging Communists, bros.
Osiris 14y ago
Pagination is particularly problematic on mobile devices where connections are slow with high latency. It's much faster to load a single page than to force users to click though to more pages. There's a few websites I run into when looking at news on my phone that have a pagination option plus a "Full article" button. I don't understand why it doesn't just load the full article. Getting to the end of the page and having to WAIT over 10 seconds to find out what the next paragraph says is frustrating. As others point out, I rarely click past the first page when I see pagination because I hate waiting for the load files. I read a heck of a lot faster than a browser can go fetch and render a new page. I'd rather take that time to read than wait.
kmfrk 14y ago
Pagination is perfectly fine, as long as it 1) isn't used to generate page views, 2) does not insult my capacity to read more than 50 words at a time (FOOORBES!), 3) is not used on a website that loads a lot of shit on each page I don't use it too much, but unless the site provides anchor links to save your progress like bookmarks, it's going to be a pan to save your progress. Have fun reading that 15-page New Yorker article in one go. Pagination sucks, when there isn't a need for it. Sometimes there is.
pre 14y ago
What I don't really understand is how pagination gives more ad impressions in a way that simply adding more adverts into the text in a long page doesn't. If the goal is more ads, why not just put more ads on longer pages?
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Maybe they pay to have their add on the top of the page? So adds further down would pay less?? Just guessing here..
  - pre 14y ago
    I think that's probably true as it goes, even though adverts above the text are more easily ignored than adverts within the text. Funny old world.
macchina 14y ago
While I hate pagination, the mortal sin of click harvesting is the "slideshow." Nothing gets my blood boiling like a Top 100 list embedded in a clickthrough slideshow. For regular articles, I use the Autopager extension for Firefox.
- nlavezzo 14y ago
  +1 for Autopager. I love it.
mcfunley 14y ago
> Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious... It's not obvious. It depends on the situation. At Etsy, we experimented with infinite scroll in search and pretty much every metric we cared about got worse. But we do use it successfully in other contexts. The thing that annoys me about this article is that it could mention A/B results in some way, but it doesn't. He's just countering some editor's opinion with his own.
itsbits 14y ago
Pagination is an issue only when it comes to touch devices..
TeMPOraL 14y ago
tl; dr: I never realized people may have such different ways of using the Internet. I am surprised by the differences in opinions here; it's kind of like there were two completely different worlds. For example, I have an exactly opposite opinion to ps2000 [0] - single page long articles are the best and I never get lost in them, because, well, every browser has a visual position indicator, also known as "scroll bar". And I love infinite scrolling of Google Images; I'd hate to have click "next page" several times. Similarly, I completely disagree with mcpie [1] - for what I saw, it's the "next page" button where people lose their interest. One-page articles have one huge benefit: you can skim them before reading. For example, it takes me about 15 seconds to skim an article and decide whether or not commit another 10 minutes for reading it. And for that sole reason, if I can't skim an article because someone cut it into 10 pages, I usually decide it's not worth reading. Then there are A/B tests [2] [3] which completely blow my mind, because I feel like I'm living in a completely different world, and there is this HUGE mass of people out there, people of whom I saw or know no one, who actually click on web ads, and love paginated articles, etc. and they are the majority, they are the income source of the Internet, and I have never seen a single representant of this huge group. So I'm confused. Are we really so different? [0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143 [1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388 [2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437 [3] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081
- Zak 14y ago
  90% of people surveyed didn't know it's possible to search within a web page using ctrl+f. Yes, we really are that different. Cite: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...
dools 14y ago
Halfway through reading about usability sins a gigantic popup yelled at me to install their iPad app.
- prawks 14y ago
  Not quite as bad as pagination, but probably #2 in annoyances.
electic 14y ago
I can't read this article. It has two pages and the title on the first page said there should be only one page for all pages on the web.
sesqu 14y ago
Since we're talking about pagination and article lengths, I'd like to take this opportunity to voice my #1 annoyance with unpaginated (and some paginated) articles: the comment section. I'm perfectly able and quite willing to approximate my progress with reading an article by observing the scroll bar. However, since the advent of social, I find I can rarely trust that information, since the comment section adds an additional multiple to the page length. I often find myself going on a pgdn adventure to figure out the length of the article I've been reading for ten minutes. Would it really be so awful if the dozen pages of commentary were collapsed behind a "show comments" or "show more comments" button? I want my progress indicator back.
pknight 14y ago
I'm just as fervent against pagination for the sake of page views and ads, but am I the only one that gets tired from endless scrolling? For long reads I'd rather click to the next page (provided it's preloaded with ajax).
louischatriot 14y ago
I found this article interesting (it really resonates with me), although a bit long. I made a tldr of it: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506c34f3657e0ad75500014c http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506c34f3657e0ad75500014c
prawks 14y ago
If a paginated article I visit doesn't have a "View All" button I typically leave. Very rarely are paginated articles so intensely interesting that I suffer through a slideshow.
dcolish 14y ago
Good thing this article was paginated. I didn't really bother reading it once I saw that. Hypocritical journalism isn't worth reading.
- wingerlang 14y ago
  The second page consists of only this: > P.S. Of course I didn’t divorce my wife just because she likes multipage articles. I divorced her because she types two spaces after a period. (Not really.) Don't know what's that about though..
DanBC 14y ago
Yet again I need to say that I'd happily pay a reasonable amount to avoid ads and get a better layout. "Free" isn't really free when I'm paying for a bunch of stuff to be downloaded that I neither want nor need. And putting myself at risk from unscrupulous or incompetent ad networks.
driverdan 14y ago
Splitting content based on chapter, category, or topic makes sense. Splitting it based on a fixed length "page" is antiquated, and not just on the web. Ebooks and ebook readers that force explicit page lengths and page "turning" are equally as annoying. Content flows much better through scrolling instead of having hard fixed length breaks.
crazygringo 14y ago
As an Internet user, I generally find pagination just as annoying as everyone else here (and paginated slide shows deserve a special ring of hell just for them). BUT, from a web design perspective, there are actually some good reasons behind text pagination, the main three being: 1) It helps you keep your place -- you can bookmark one of the 15 pages to continue reading from later on, or forward to your friend ("check out the third paragraph" instead of "84th paragraph"). Obviously, you'd never show a 100,000-word article on one page (except for printing). At some point, pagination is necessary. Where to draw the line is obviously depends on a multitude of factors. 2) Feeling like you're "in" the site, not in no-man's land. From a web design perspective, you always want people to be able to navigate easily to other parts of the site -- you want stuff in the sidebar, never be too far away from header/footer, etc. You don't want people to be in a narrow column of text, with total white on both sides and nothing else. (Obviously users might often prefer this, like I do, hence Instapaper etc., but other users also like to be able to skip around to the rest of the site easily once they decide this particular article isn't for them, etc.) Of course, "floating" sidebars, headers, etc. can help alleviate this, but this requires the sidebars to be very small, which is not always possible. 3) "Chunking" large pieces of content is just a good thing. A huge wall of text is just no good from a usability or legibility standpoint. This, of course, is why articles are broken down into sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, etc., so people "know where they are". Now I'll be the first to admit that paging is a particularly inelegant sledgehammer way of chunking, but when you're dealing with lots of articles of different lengths, formats, etc., it's a kind of lowest-common-denominator that is seen as better than nothing. I don't think the current way most sites handle pagination is really that good, and it's a particularly bizarre combination to have pages that are longer than the viewing area, so you have to scroll and have to page. But given the way browsers are put together, it's a solution that basically works, given all the design constraints. As a final note, I also think sites which don't provide any single-page or print option at all, also deserve a special place in hell. :)
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  #1 can be solved with URL hash / fragments, which link to anchors within the page. If the user has JavaScript enabled you can even automatically update the fragment as they scroll.
zio99 14y ago
Ironic that they split the article into 2 pages, and readibility only gets the abstract, so ads got in the way as well.
hansy 14y ago
What about pagination with comments?
mey 14y ago
Did anyone else's system grind to an utter halt from ad's on that page? (Irony is not lost)
donkeylipstick 14y ago
Safari will automatically merge all pages into a single page, strip out the ads, and reformat the article using nice legible typography. Is this fair to the publishers? No. But I'm glad a browser came up with a solution.

189 points by zonotope 14y ago

zalew 14y ago

hey, nobody beats Polish newspapers http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,6071889,Teraz_go_zarymuje.html http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,6071889,Teraz_go_zarymuje.html check out the pagination

anigbrowl 14y ago
Good grief.

mfincham 14y ago

Much bigger sin: Boing Boing style "endlessly load more content with Javascript" nonsense. If you're browsing on an (arguably flawed in its implementation) iOS device where page state gets unexpectedly dumped all the time (e.g, tab switching, browser crashes, "multitasking" switches out to an IM client), this style of "pagination" is utterly pants. I end up having to manually edit the URL to advance through content like Boing Boing and Tumblr just to be sure that when Safari or Chrome inevitably next dump my page state I won't have to start from the very top again.

krogsgard 14y ago
Yeah, paginating articles and paginating archives are two totally different things. Paginating articles (as the article linked describes) is not a good user experience. But not paginating archives, otherwise known as endless scrolling, in my opinion, is not good.
- cheald 14y ago
  Endless scrolling can work if you use it in conjunction with replaceState to make sure that the URL reflects that the user is looking at. Outside of that, though, definitely annoying.
machrider 14y ago
Yeah, I can't stand infinite scroll pages. It becomes impossible to pass a link to someone to a specific section of entries. It generally breaks the back button -- when I click a link and then go back to an infinite scroll page, it has dropped all the dynamic content and has to reload it, and then I have to scroll back to where I was (which may have involved several minutes of scrolling and loading content). Perhaps it's irrational, but it also frustrates me that such pages have no bottom. I think people got used to a model of a page where it has a top and a bottom, and now it's a bit weird to interact with. One of my favorite examples is Facebook's implementation, which leaves several useful navigation links in the page footer. These links taunt you as you tried to scroll to reach them, only to have more news content appear in your view and push the footer off screen again. (I think they've since duplicated those footer links in other locations so you can reach them, but it doesn't change the fact that this broken UI model presents options and then sucks them away before you can click on them.)
- darkstalker 14y ago
  Infinite scroll pages are harder to read with a pointing device withouth a scroll wheel, because the scroll bar jumps randomly when reaching the bottom.
mfincham 14y ago
Boing Boing at least have fixed this. Even though the page still scrolls forever, at the bottom of each "segment" the "Older Entries" link no longer disappears when the additional content loads, allowing for optional pagination :)

di 14y ago

But of course, even this article itself is paginated. Perhaps ironically, but still.

krogsgard 14y ago
If you read even a little bit of the article, you'll see it's Slate's policy to do so. But even then, if you click the next page, he just completes the joke he made in the article.
- fletchowns 14y ago
  Poor guy couldn't even get through the first sentence before he felt the urge to try to impress us all with his keen observation.

tnuc 14y ago

Article on single page. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/website_pagination_stories_should_load_into_a_single_page_every_time_.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/10/...

ynniv 14y ago
... but you'll miss the joke on page 2
- bockris 14y ago
  Which reinforces his point for me. I didn't visit the 2nd page due to apathy.

djloche 14y ago

>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page." As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not. Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in making $) significant time and $ A/B testing various levels of pagination such that their sites are optimized so that there are just fewer pages than their readership is unwilling to tolerate. The end result is that their sites are optimized to make the most amount of money. If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it. Of course, there are copycats that don't do the testing, don't optimize for their niche of readers, and are probably losing both money and readers because of it. We can argue about publications adopting different business models, but that's a different story. Advertisers pay a premium for engaged, targeted niche audiences that match their products/services. That's the reality of the online advertising market.

0r3jq4a0j 14y ago
If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it. I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case. If you look at Plotz's comment, it's exactly what most editors will say: Pages that run too long can irritate readers. We run stories of 2,000, 4,000, even 6,000 words, and to run that much text down a single page can daunt and depress a reader. So pagination can make pages seem more welcoming, more chewable. They really believe this. It's important to realize that despite all the buzz about A/B testing in the industry, editors pretty universally believe they don't need to validate their opinions through testing. Why not? Because though school and their careers they've been told that their opinions matter, and, in fact, that's all their job really is: voicing opinions and making judgements, because they believe they have special insight into what readers want. Look no further than Poltz, a writer and editor with no software design or development experience, who somehow believes he's qualified to make that statement.
- joshuarrrr 14y ago
  I'll ignore your general disdain for writers and editors, and point out that not all readers want the same thing. I've pushed for non-paginated articles at my publication, but I admit that I'm not always happy with the result, and we do hear reader complaints about not being able to orient themselves in an article like this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmological-supercomputer http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmolog... (hopefully a wider content-well after an upcoming redesign will help) I'm curious to hear what people think of a hybrid pagination system, like that currently used by Computing Now magazine. I like that it gives the user a sense of the article length without interrupting the flow of reading. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/careers/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=transitioning-from-software-to-software-assurance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/careers/cont...

SjuulJanssen 14y ago

Autopatchwork rocks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeolcjbaammbkgaiagooljfdepnjmkfd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeol...

mushishi 14y ago
I wish it worked. I actually browsed through Postgresql documentation last night, and thought this kind of a thing would be useful as it is paginated into a lot of subsections. But the plugin didn't seem to have any effect. edit: Within minutes it has shown to be useful on other sites. Thanks for the suggestion.
- SjuulJanssen 14y ago
  It depends on whether the page uses rel="next"

ps2000 14y ago

Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading. Pagination is better than no navigation, this is why Google Image Search is weird to navigate. The absence of proper pagination may be even the reason Google Wave has found no friends beyond its believers. Pagination sucks when text length per page is too short and even more when 50% of the content consists of advertisements. I avoid such websites.

tripzilch 14y ago
> Only one thing sucks more than pagination: a very long article, you accidentally scroll and forget which section you are reading. That's why some people tend to select and highlight random bits of text while reading. It's not always because they're just fidgety :)

bobsy 14y ago

As soon as I hit a page with multiple pages I almost always lose interest and immediately leave. I can read down a single page. However when I see an article with 6 pages I am like ... ... sod that. Its not so much the reading. Its the slow page loading which gets me down. If people did pagination right with ajax preloading the next page then I would be happy. 99% of sites do not do this. Instead their sites are slow because they have to load a bunch of third party ad's. Moving from page to page when each page takes 2-3 seconds to load kills the reading experience. A Wired article featured on HN recently. I don't remember what it was about but it had a gallery on it. You would think in today's day and age when you click the thumbnail the main image would change. On this wired story no.. the whole page reloaded. Due to third party ad's each page load took ages. The page didn't bounce down to where the image should show. While I thought the topic was interesting the user experience was so terrible I abandoned it. If you are going to force pagination on readers then have a single page option. Preferably at the top of the article. This way you cater for everyone.

jaxonrice 14y ago
Most Wired articles that contain galleries have a 'view all' link to a page that has all of the gallery images on it. The link isn't well signposted but the resulting page offers a far better reading experience.
gizzlon 14y ago
Use something like readability or open all the pages in background tabs (ctrl-click) before you get to the end of page 1. I almost never read long articles to the end, unless I've added them to readability. If I can't open them in the background so they're loaded when I want them, I usually don't bother
noselasd 14y ago
I always look for the "Print" button on such pages - as that shows the content on a single page. If there's no Print option, I'm not bothering reading the thing, unless it contains info I absolutely need.
re_todd 14y ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking the same thing last week, wondering why I hate pagination when I used to like it. I realized it's the time it takes to load, which is probably due to the ads. I'm on a broadband cable connection, and some of the sites take 5-10 seconds to load the next page. One popular site a few days ago took 15 seconds to load the next page. Maybe I have a neighbor hogging cable bandwidth, but still the pages with 3rd party ads are noticeably worse.

sethbannon 14y ago

There goes Business Insider's business model.

pinchyfingers 14y ago

No, they should continue paginating because most readers will just click to the second page and Slate will increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that Slate has tested this and found it to be true. If there was something different they could do to increase ad views, they'd be doing that instead.

pinchyfingers 14y ago
How is this down voted? Is it not a valid comment that could lead to a meaningful discussion? Stop being tree-hugging Communists, bros.

Osiris 14y ago

Pagination is particularly problematic on mobile devices where connections are slow with high latency. It's much faster to load a single page than to force users to click though to more pages. There's a few websites I run into when looking at news on my phone that have a pagination option plus a "Full article" button. I don't understand why it doesn't just load the full article. Getting to the end of the page and having to WAIT over 10 seconds to find out what the next paragraph says is frustrating. As others point out, I rarely click past the first page when I see pagination because I hate waiting for the load files. I read a heck of a lot faster than a browser can go fetch and render a new page. I'd rather take that time to read than wait.

kmfrk 14y ago

Pagination is perfectly fine, as long as it 1) isn't used to generate page views, 2) does not insult my capacity to read more than 50 words at a time (FOOORBES!), 3) is not used on a website that loads a lot of shit on each page I don't use it too much, but unless the site provides anchor links to save your progress like bookmarks, it's going to be a pan to save your progress. Have fun reading that 15-page New Yorker article in one go. Pagination sucks, when there isn't a need for it. Sometimes there is.

pre 14y ago

What I don't really understand is how pagination gives more ad impressions in a way that simply adding more adverts into the text in a long page doesn't. If the goal is more ads, why not just put more ads on longer pages?

gizzlon 14y ago
Maybe they pay to have their add on the top of the page? So adds further down would pay less?? Just guessing here..
- pre 14y ago
  I think that's probably true as it goes, even though adverts above the text are more easily ignored than adverts within the text. Funny old world.

macchina 14y ago

While I hate pagination, the mortal sin of click harvesting is the "slideshow." Nothing gets my blood boiling like a Top 100 list embedded in a clickthrough slideshow. For regular articles, I use the Autopager extension for Firefox.

nlavezzo 14y ago
+1 for Autopager. I love it.

mcfunley 14y ago

> Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious... It's not obvious. It depends on the situation. At Etsy, we experimented with infinite scroll in search and pretty much every metric we cared about got worse. But we do use it successfully in other contexts. The thing that annoys me about this article is that it could mention A/B results in some way, but it doesn't. He's just countering some editor's opinion with his own.

itsbits 14y ago

Pagination is an issue only when it comes to touch devices..

TeMPOraL 14y ago

tl; dr: I never realized people may have such different ways of using the Internet. I am surprised by the differences in opinions here; it's kind of like there were two completely different worlds. For example, I have an exactly opposite opinion to ps2000 [0] - single page long articles are the best and I never get lost in them, because, well, every browser has a visual position indicator, also known as "scroll bar". And I love infinite scrolling of Google Images; I'd hate to have click "next page" several times. Similarly, I completely disagree with mcpie [1] - for what I saw, it's the "next page" button where people lose their interest. One-page articles have one huge benefit: you can skim them before reading. For example, it takes me about 15 seconds to skim an article and decide whether or not commit another 10 minutes for reading it. And for that sole reason, if I can't skim an article because someone cut it into 10 pages, I usually decide it's not worth reading. Then there are A/B tests [2] [3] which completely blow my mind, because I feel like I'm living in a completely different world, and there is this HUGE mass of people out there, people of whom I saw or know no one, who actually click on web ads, and love paginated articles, etc. and they are the majority, they are the income source of the Internet, and I have never seen a single representant of this huge group. So I'm confused. Are we really so different? [0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143 [1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388 [2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437 [3] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081

Zak 14y ago
90% of people surveyed didn't know it's possible to search within a web page using ctrl+f. Yes, we really are that different. Cite: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...

dools 14y ago

Halfway through reading about usability sins a gigantic popup yelled at me to install their iPad app.

prawks 14y ago
Not quite as bad as pagination, but probably #2 in annoyances.

electic 14y ago

I can't read this article. It has two pages and the title on the first page said there should be only one page for all pages on the web.

sesqu 14y ago

Since we're talking about pagination and article lengths, I'd like to take this opportunity to voice my #1 annoyance with unpaginated (and some paginated) articles: the comment section. I'm perfectly able and quite willing to approximate my progress with reading an article by observing the scroll bar. However, since the advent of social, I find I can rarely trust that information, since the comment section adds an additional multiple to the page length. I often find myself going on a pgdn adventure to figure out the length of the article I've been reading for ten minutes. Would it really be so awful if the dozen pages of commentary were collapsed behind a "show comments" or "show more comments" button? I want my progress indicator back.

pknight 14y ago

I'm just as fervent against pagination for the sake of page views and ads, but am I the only one that gets tired from endless scrolling? For long reads I'd rather click to the next page (provided it's preloaded with ajax).

louischatriot 14y ago

I found this article interesting (it really resonates with me), although a bit long. I made a tldr of it: http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506c34f3657e0ad75500014c http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506c34f3657e0ad75500014c

prawks 14y ago

If a paginated article I visit doesn't have a "View All" button I typically leave. Very rarely are paginated articles so intensely interesting that I suffer through a slideshow.

dcolish 14y ago

Good thing this article was paginated. I didn't really bother reading it once I saw that. Hypocritical journalism isn't worth reading.

wingerlang 14y ago
The second page consists of only this: > P.S. Of course I didn’t divorce my wife just because she likes multipage articles. I divorced her because she types two spaces after a period. (Not really.) Don't know what's that about though..

DanBC 14y ago

Yet again I need to say that I'd happily pay a reasonable amount to avoid ads and get a better layout. "Free" isn't really free when I'm paying for a bunch of stuff to be downloaded that I neither want nor need. And putting myself at risk from unscrupulous or incompetent ad networks.

driverdan 14y ago

Splitting content based on chapter, category, or topic makes sense. Splitting it based on a fixed length "page" is antiquated, and not just on the web. Ebooks and ebook readers that force explicit page lengths and page "turning" are equally as annoying. Content flows much better through scrolling instead of having hard fixed length breaks.

crazygringo 14y ago

As an Internet user, I generally find pagination just as annoying as everyone else here (and paginated slide shows deserve a special ring of hell just for them). BUT, from a web design perspective, there are actually some good reasons behind text pagination, the main three being: 1) It helps you keep your place -- you can bookmark one of the 15 pages to continue reading from later on, or forward to your friend ("check out the third paragraph" instead of "84th paragraph"). Obviously, you'd never show a 100,000-word article on one page (except for printing). At some point, pagination is necessary. Where to draw the line is obviously depends on a multitude of factors. 2) Feeling like you're "in" the site, not in no-man's land. From a web design perspective, you always want people to be able to navigate easily to other parts of the site -- you want stuff in the sidebar, never be too far away from header/footer, etc. You don't want people to be in a narrow column of text, with total white on both sides and nothing else. (Obviously users might often prefer this, like I do, hence Instapaper etc., but other users also like to be able to skip around to the rest of the site easily once they decide this particular article isn't for them, etc.) Of course, "floating" sidebars, headers, etc. can help alleviate this, but this requires the sidebars to be very small, which is not always possible. 3) "Chunking" large pieces of content is just a good thing. A huge wall of text is just no good from a usability or legibility standpoint. This, of course, is why articles are broken down into sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, etc., so people "know where they are". Now I'll be the first to admit that paging is a particularly inelegant sledgehammer way of chunking, but when you're dealing with lots of articles of different lengths, formats, etc., it's a kind of lowest-common-denominator that is seen as better than nothing. I don't think the current way most sites handle pagination is really that good, and it's a particularly bizarre combination to have pages that are longer than the viewing area, so you have to scroll and have to page. But given the way browsers are put together, it's a solution that basically works, given all the design constraints. As a final note, I also think sites which don't provide any single-page or print option at all, also deserve a special place in hell. :)

tlrobinson 14y ago
#1 can be solved with URL hash / fragments, which link to anchors within the page. If the user has JavaScript enabled you can even automatically update the fragment as they scroll.

zio99 14y ago

Ironic that they split the article into 2 pages, and readibility only gets the abstract, so ads got in the way as well.

hansy 14y ago

What about pagination with comments?

mey 14y ago

Did anyone else's system grind to an utter halt from ad's on that page? (Irony is not lost)

donkeylipstick 14y ago

Safari will automatically merge all pages into a single page, strip out the ads, and reformat the article using nice legible typography. Is this fair to the publishers? No. But I'm glad a browser came up with a solution.