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Pagination is a great tool for presenting data. It breaks up large volumes of information into formats and amounts that our brains and browsers can handle. Search engine results, photo galleries and e-books are all good examples of where logical page breaks make a difference to the user experience. Yet sometimes we come across an inappropriate use of pagination that decreases usability - news articles for example.

The peculiar practice of breaking up single news articles into two or more pages caught on a few years back and was attacked mostly due to the obvious grab for page impressions. But its proponents (usually accountants and marketing types) counter-argued citing that pagination also brought greater levels of readability and usability - just like a spreadsheet!

My opinion is that it creates more trouble than solutions and in practice, as a daily consumer of online news, the whole thing really cooks my noodle. Particularly when it involves stories that normally fit within the view port of 1024×768 resolution and require a comfortable amount of scrolling to access the page’s information. Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald is a blatant offender*. Granted it offers a link to a “single page version” - however this only means that you have to click at least twice to view the entire article. And what happens when you hit the back button on the single page version? You return to the paginated version of the same article of course! Exactly where you didn’t want to go.

The International Herald Tribune is another example. Here you have the opportunity to open a popup window to view the article in a three column layout with… wait for it… more pagination!! The printer-friendly version is their only salvation but since this page does not contain any navigation you have to rely on the blessed back button.

Arguments for and against

For

• Inflates page impression statistics and therefore ad revenue - while they may deny it, this is primary reason for the practice. It’s great to present your client with figures that out-perform those of your competitor two-fold.
• Speeds up page load (I’d like to refute this - modern news sites contain so much junk these days: javascript, adcode, flash and so on, that an extra two kilobytes of text usually doesn’t make that much difference).
• Breaks up very long articles for better readability so that you are not presented with an intimidating amount of information.
• Increases usability through requiring you to scroll less (this is a hard argument to maintain if the length of page doesn’t exceed 1200px and the developers have heard of anchor links).
• Possibility of providing data on reader behaviour, that is, whether they could be bothered reading the entire article.

Against

• Falsely inflates page impression statistics and therefore ad revenue - it’s sneaky and I wouldn’t like to be lied to if I were paying 1,000s of dollars to advertise on a site.
• Creates confusing search results if all the pages are indexed separately. Which page do you want Google users to click on first? The third or the first?
• It goes against the widely acknowledged method that humans employ to read text on the web. People skim and want information as quickly as possible. How can you skim an article when all you have is a third of the content and you have wait for a page refresh?
• It creates more clicking for the user when scrolling using a mouse wheel is far easier.
• Permanent links to the article will only link to half the article and, if you just wanted to read an interesting quote from the last paragraph, well, keep clicking sucker. This also has implications for SEO as pages other than the first will receive little or no external/internal linkages.
• Online news is not a newspaper and you don’t have to break articles over pages - get over it. Breaking up a 1,500 word op-ed article into two pages is just plain evil anyway.
• If you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on information architecture experts and you still don’t know how to organise text data not exceeding seven kilobytes, then something is clearly wrong.
• News sites already expect their readers to put up with glaring advertisements placed in the middle of the article . Forcing them to click and see two isn’t polite.

And what are the implications for screen readers? I assume that they will hit the end of the first-third of the article and wonder why they are being presented with a link to page two. “Just when I was getting into it!”

What to do?

Complain. I did, although it didn’t change anything. If it’s really about usability, suggest that they use AJAX to pull in article sections, or a simple show/hide JavaScript function - which would be preferable since all the text is loaded onto the page and it would degrade gracefully in non-JavaScript browsers.

Personally, I have directed the majority of my online news consuming behaviour elsewhere out of principle although I do like to catch up on the headlines in Sydney. My way around it is to view the text only version of the site, where one is available (see smh.com.au/text) or read real newspapers.

For people in the know, there is aso greasemonkey to address this stupidity. You can write your own script to force the single page view, if available, by accessing the DOM. But it isn’t a solution for everyone: the majority of dedicated news readers probably don’t use Firefox plugins, let alone the browser itself.

Maybe you don’t care about this or it doesn’t affect you. Great! I wish I had the capacity to cut through the crap.

*I am targeting the Sydney Morning Herald because I read it everyday and it frustrates me to no end.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 3:56 am and is filed under General musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.