This wasn’t my original opinion until I talked with a team member at work. Funny how I don’t talk DataTables at the beach or while slogging beers at Medieval Times. Anyway the problem, I thought, was…writing an efficient mechanism for paging through thousands of potential search results in this application I was working on.
But then, my teammate asks,”Have you ever LIKED paging through thousands of search results?” No. Can’t say that I have… In most cases where I have thousands of results, I would rather:
- Crawl under a rock and drink more beer
- Do a more detailed query to lesson the results
- Sort the results based on certain criteria
Prettymuch ANYTHING but be stuck wondering,”Maybe if I click forward to page 57 it will be closer to the data I am looking for.” So, the cosmic point here is…if you find yourself investing effort figuring out how to present a large amount of data to your users…maybe the FIRST thing to do is step back and make sure that’s what your users WANT to see.
Cosmic, huh? Yeah, sometimes that 5 watt bulb burns bright for me.