Interface Watch: Twitter pagination
Twitter’s pagination controls have always been simple, but recently they got a whole lot simpler. The classic ‘next’ and ‘prev’ links have been replaced by a single ‘more’ button that loads more tweets on the same page.
Simplified pagination controls like this can greatly improve usability, and they’ve been around for a while as bookmarklets, browser add-ons and in the occasional web-app. (Dopplr uses a similar control for lists of contacts.) But it seems to be the first time an interface like this has appeared quite so prominently in a high-profile application.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s version doesn’t degrade gracefully, so usability actually gets worse when JavaScript is unavailable. Clicking ‘more’ reloads the page with the next group of tweets…but doesn’t provide a link to return to the page you were on before. Forcing users to resort to their browser’s back button isn’t ideal—it would have been better to use progressive enhancement and to show the AJAX-dependent ‘more’ button only if AJAX is actually available.
No responses:
Responses are closed for this post.