View All and Next Page

Do people use this?

[sleepy_eye]

Need some info on this one.
Several pages on our site have over 200 items. We have those pages display all items one page. This of course increases load times and can overwhelm people; too much to decide.

In you guys experience do customers use navigation to see additional pages, or are they blind to any subsequent pages?

Thanks

[lorax]

The last study I read indicated that users are more tolerant of clicking to view the next page as long as they feel they are getting closer to their goal. They seem to recognize the value of pagination versus a very long page that takes forever to load.

[willybfriendly]

As a customer, I absolutely hate having to click through endless pages.

I prefer an option to choose how many items I want displayed per page - preferably with "all" as the final choice.

If there is no "compare" function and I am looking at similar items it is only worse. Unless one opens multiple tabs, how can they do even a cursory comparison of an item on page one and another 12 pages deep?

I recently went through this looking for a new washing machine. I was amazed at how poor many of the "big" sites are when it comes to these basics.

[dpd1]

On the postal site, they have a million items to purchase... They break them down into pages and then have "view all" at the end of the page numbers. I hit view all every time. To me, clicking is worse than waiting. Since I don't know what page the thing I want is on, I'd rather wait a couple seconds to have all of them load, rather than having to click through each one. Besides... Depending on how the site is setup... If you timed it out in total, it would probably be a longer amount of time to call up each page, than just the one, even with all the images on one page.

But that's just me... Who knows what most people do.

[buckworks]

As a shopper I like having the option to "View All", or at least a few dozen items at once.

No matter how many items are displayed, design your pages / templates so the top items will display even if items lower down are still coming in. Avoid an "all or nothing" loading sequence.

[rocknbil]

Some like sugar in their coffee, some like dairy, some prefer tea . . . .

You really should allow them to choose. Provide a working search, pagination, and a place to change # per page on every page. Additionally a category list may be useful if your products can be categorized; people who hate cats will get frustrated if they have to sift through five pages of cats looking for dogs (which is another option to offer, don't just assume and sort alphabetically, give them the choices of alpha, most recent, category, and direction.)

If I want 200 items on a page, I'll select it. If I just want to see if your site has Ginormous Widgets, I'll search for it.

The goal is to put the least frustration between your visitor and their problem, give them every option to do so. People will always have different preferences for how they browse, I think the posts so far clearly demonstrate that. :-)

[sleepy_eye]

Thank you guys!
Excellent posts. From reading these posts and asking other people there seems to be a big variety of likes and dislikes. So basically I need it all lol: comparisons, items per page, view all, next page, page numbers, and arrows.

[willybfriendly]

Don't forget the breadcrumbs. I use them all the time on ecommerce sites.