Thursday, April 5, 2012

Implementation driven interfaces?

I've recently encountered some interesting pagination in the Google Groups admin interface. It starts off simple enough, nothing exciting here...

Instead of the usual 'Previous', we see 'First' on the next page.

Are they just being clever? Knowing that there's only one previous page? No such luck…

We've reached the end of the list. I hope you've found what you're looking for, otherwise start over from the beginning!

One has to wonder, who designed this interface? You can only go forward. If you overshoot, it's back to square one, then click, click, click… It's clear it does not have users in mind at all.

My guess is that it's based on some limitation in the backend storage or query mechanism. The system only allows forward navigation of query results, so the interface simply mirrors that…

What an incredibly frustrating experience! I'll never take simple pagination for granted again.

It's a good reminder to think about your users and how they will interact with the system. Mirroring the programming interface rarely works.

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