Michael Gaigg: Über UI/UX Design

Design Guidelines: Pagination

One thing I hear from visual designers over and over again: 'Those Usability guys destroy our creative possibilities'. While I understand the desire to live in complete design heaven I want to strongly emphasize the need for a usable design heaven. Every thing in this world has a certain affordance, i.e. it affords to do something which we need to design for. A chair for example affords to be seated on, designers are therefore constrained to design chairs in a way that supports the human body while sitting. Now, does that restrict creativity in chair design? Without doubt NO, numerous examples show that thousands of different chairs exist but all have one common goal: to support the task on hand - which is seating a person!

Variety of chairs showing the existence of a usable design heaven

Designing page elements like pagination is not different. Navigation options must be visible and the pagination must be intuitive. Creative solutions can still be user-friendly as shown in smashingmagazine's Pagination Gallery.

But now, here are the

Design Guidelines for Pagination

1. Provide large clickable areas
2. Don’t use underlines
3. Identify the current page and don't hyperlink it
4. Space out page links
5. Provide Previous and Next links
6. Use First and Last links (where applicable)
7. Only use Last links when they make sense
8. Put First and Last links on the outside
9. Provide a reasonable number of pagination links
10. Eclipse missing or endless pages

Code Sample / Template

End results (from http://digg.com/):

<div class="pagination">
<span class="nextprev">&laquo; Previous</span>
<span class="current">1</span>
<a title="Go to page 2" href="/page2" mce_href="/page2">2</a>
<a title="Go to page 3" href="/page3" mce_href="/page3">3</a>
<a title="Go to page 4" href="/page4" mce_href="/page4">4</a>
<a title="Go to page 5" href="/page5" mce_href="/page5">5</a>
<a title="Go to page 6" href="/page6" mce_href="/page6">6</a>
<a title="Go to page 7" href="/page7" mce_href="/page7">7</a>
<a title="Go to page 8" href="/page8" mce_href="/page8">8</a>
<a title="Go to page 9" href="/page9" mce_href="/page9">9</a>
<a title="Go to page 10" href="/page10" mce_href="/page10">10</a>
<span>…</span>
<a title="Go to page 252" href="/page252" mce_href="/page252">252</a>
<a title="Go to page 253" href="/page253" mce_href="/page253">253</a>
<a title="Go to Next Page" class="nextprev" href="/page2" mce_href="/page2">Next &raquo;</a>
</div> 


.pagination {
margin: 5px 0;
line-height: 2em;
}
.pagination span {
}
.pagination a:hover {
background-color: #7F7FB2;
color: #FFF;
}
.pagination a, .pagination a:visited, .pagination a:active {
border: 1px solid #CCC;
background-color: #F2F2F7;
font-weight: normal;
padding: 2px 5px;
text-align: center;
color: #000;
text-decoration: none;
}
.pagination .selected {
background-color: #7F7FB2;
color: #FFF;
font-weight: bold;
}


References

• Ates, F. Pagination 101 - Rules for good pagination. http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2007/06/22/pagination-101
• Rønn-Jensen, J. Usability of Pagination Links. http://justaddwater.dk/2008/01/03/usability-of-pagination-links
• Showcase, D. Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/16/pagination-gallery-examples-and-good-practices
• Yahoo!. Design Pattern Library: Item Pagination. http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=itempagination

Similar Posts:

• Design Guidelines: Breadcrumbs
• Best Practices for Accessible Stylesheets
• Design Guidelines: Print Stylesheet

About Michael Gaigg

Michael Gaigg is a User Interface Expert at Esri. He is the team lead of the UI Engineering group in Professional Services and has been designing map applications for over 8 years.