The current pattern requires several clicks to the next or prev buttons to reach the middle of the result set.

Some of the questions that came up:
- is it newest, newer – older, oldest or
is it oldest, older – newer, newest

i’m in two minds about it. personally, i prefer the first (newest to oldest), but from similar scenarios (calendar applications) time (think months, or days of the week) is usually sorted left to right oldest to newest. hmmm…

- what happens if I can sort the contents

sort as in changing a setting a la “show me the oldest first, or the newest first”? if it’s just that, then i’d say the order should remain the same.

- what if you can go between chronological and other sorts… it this case we have been recommending item pagination since it handles things generally.

if you’re sorting by different criteria, then the whole paginator would need to change (e.g. sorting by author may require a change to a generic prev/next).

This would work if the data is strictly sorted by alphabet, the data is fairly evenly spread across the range of alpha-buckets.

Alpha-buckets seem to work best when the size in each bucket is not fixed. In other words letting the alpha group decide the page chunking.

Fixed size chunking can leave some odd arrangements of alpha bucket labels (a-a,a-a,c-e or aa-ab,ab-az,ca-ez)

Also, if you change sort it can be problematic.

An alternate that I once used was to provide first, prev, page numbers, next, last + a combo box drop down that has the page chunking as you proposed. It is briefly mentioned in an
article I wrote last year.

There is also a screen shot.

Some of the questions that came up:
- is it newest, newer – older, oldest or
is it oldest, older – newer, newest
(I vote for the former, since time threaded is usually organized newest->oldest. but that can be changed)
- what happens if I can sort the contents (does this flip– i hope not :-)
- what if you can go between chronological and other sorts… it this case we have been recommending item pagination since it handles things generally.

thoughts?

ie – instead of page 1, 2, 3 which tells the user nothing about whether a click to that page will be useful, show an indication of what page/item instances will be returned – a-ba, ba-ce, etc.

Will update.

Solution
* Break the list of items into a sequence of pages.
* Display a control that contains links to the
* Provide links to access the previous and next pages of information.

That second one is cut off on the page. What’s it supposed to say?