Pagination Alternatives

Question

I am looking for ideas for pagination alternatives. I am aware of 2 pagination schemes:

• Click on pages pagination - my favorite example
• Infinite scroll pagination - one implementation here that seems to work

There must be some other less known/popular ways to do it. Bonus points if you can provide a link to a demo

Thanks

Answer 1

I think that a good alternative to paging is a way, or more than one way, for the user to tell the server something about what it is they're looking for. For some types of content (like, a whole lot of text, say from a research paper or a work of fiction), of course you're probably stuck with paging. But when the content is naturally searchable (like tables of checking account transactions), good, simple filtering tools are probably more useful than pagination schemes. (Actually you may need both.)

Answer 2

I worked on a GWT hybrid technique where it did an "infinite scroll" but only showed a "window/page" of information at a time. So it only loaded a fixed amount of data to the browser at any given time. If you could display 20 items and scrolled it just updated the list 20 items at a time. Paging without paging, scrolling without scrolling.

Of course this is a trivial definition of the actual implementation, which was much smarter than this sounds and very optimized for round trips. And this was a list of results that was already filtered down with search criteria. They go hand in hand.