One of the only UI elements in the past that allowed users to traverse multiple pages of results was pagination. There are few databases any of us interact that don’t use those “next” or “previous” links: Google, gmail, flickr, etc.
About a year ago I saw the guys at “Unspace”:http://unspace.ca had “implemented”:http://unspace.ca/livefilter a nice alternative to traditional pagination. I should note that their work was based on something “similar”:http://www.humanized.com/reader/ that was done by “Humanized”:http://www.humanized.com/reader/. These solutions load in more results as you scroll to the bottom of the page – No more next or previous.
As seen in the image below, the Mail application on the iphone displays a button at the bottom of the page that appends 25 additional results to it – an elegant solution.
What I like most about these solutions is that they are non-destructive, that is, when I select more results I don’t lose the ones I’ve already seen. I’d love to see more implementations like this.
written by Geoff Teehan
This is also what Google Reader does very well in the feed reader.
The only drawback I see to this approach is that you can’t easily skip far ahead in the list when dealing with a very large set of results. But how often do you really need/want to do that?
Agree with Seb on the drawback of this approach, but also think it’s not that much of an issue.
Google also uses this approach to nifty effect on the their experimental/sandbox for search at:
http://www.searchmash.com
Do a search, and click on the see more results link. I love it.