Cindy Lu wrote:

> I recently visited some users who use an application that has default
> setting 25 rows per page. I noticed that the first thing that users
did when
> they arrived at that page was to reset the page to Max. They use this
> application this everyday. They complained why the system couldn't
remember
> their setting. That table usually has 100-250 rows.

That's exactly my experience.  I always set the page size to the max,
and then am unhappy if the web app doesn't remember my preference the
next time I use it.

As others have pointed out, there is a difference if the result set is
moderately big, for example 100 or 200 rows, versus when it is huge, for
example the thousands or even millions of results you could get from a
Google web search.  If the result set is huge, or may be huge, you
pretty much have to break it into pages.  But if it is just moderately
big my preference as a user is to see the whole thing in one scrolling
page, rather than in several separate pages.  An example of the
"moderately big" category is a shopping app where the most results a
user could ever see is the number of items for sale at one web site,
which is bounded.  See the search results in zappos.com.

If the results are user-sortable, for example by clicking on a column
header, then one big page also works better than several separate pages.

- Mitch Gart

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