How useful is View All?

We have changed our scrolling habits, and Web Development reflects this. Twenty years ago you didn’t scroll, you just looked gormlessly at the rectangle in front of you (hey, it was the 90s!).

 

Now, people are used to moving a page up and down to continue reading or look for information, but there is still plenty to consider when deciding how to present information.

 

In Jakob Nielsen’s blog, he looks at pagination options. In this blog post we are going to focus on what he has to say about View All.

 

He outlines the benefits of having a View All option based on their testing.

 

Basically, it comes down to this: some people prefer to see everything on one page, some people don’t. However, someone who wants things split over several pages will not mind if there is a View All button on the page, whereas someone who does want to View All and is not offered it, will mind.

 

So, in summary – you may as well have it as an option. Particularly for websites where items to view differ based on personal taste, such as fashion. From experience, I know I am happy to quickly scan lots of clothes on one page and will always use View All for this.

 

How about you – are there certain websites that you always use View All?

 

Nielsen also suggests – sensibly – that a query which could generate thousands of responses, you would not want a page to load that many. In which case, an upper limit can be imposed.

 

At Eastpoint Software, we are fans of dynamically loading pages – more about that another time.

 

Eastpoint are web software developers based in Cambridge, UK. Technologies we use include mongodb and node.js. See our website for more.