Does it make sense to let the user chose how many items are shown per page? Or does it make sense under certain circumstances? When? When not?
This is how some big websites handle it:
- Google: Used to be in advanced search, doesn't work with Google Instant
- Bing: Can be set in preferences
- Amazon: Nope
- Ebay: Yes, looks like this:
My Impression is that this is a remnant from the old days when the number of items had a real impact on the loading time (so you would generally have it low and allow users with more bandwidth to set it higher). But many people I talked with want to keep the feature. Any thoughts? Pros and cons?
Answer
I think pagination is another one of these cases where a good default value makes all the difference, and - as Amazon and Google show - it's then even possible to keep the burden of choice from your users altogether.
In my opinion, a selectable value for the number of items per page really only makes sense if that one page contains multiple conflicting requirements - e.g. providing the user with a quick overview over lots of data and showing lots of details of single data items without overwhelming the user.
In this case, an underlying problem may be that the purpose of this page is not clearly defined.
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