Heuristic UX Evaluation of Pager

Heuristic UX Evaluation - Gary & Barbara - March 10, 2008

Comments/Suggestions for Filtering (affect all the pager designs)

• Not sure the color change under the headers indicating the a filter has been applied is enough of a change to indicate this to the user.  This may need something additional.
• Find button --> Search button - Search is a more recognizable term and used throughout the Internet
• Number of items / total number of items:  Having this at the bottom right corner of table seemed less noticeable for user.  We felt this should be moved above or near the Show # of items on page drop-down, see this image idea:
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• "Back to All" - we felt this was adding the wrong cues in that the user might confuse it with the Back button on a browser.  When in fact this button take them out of their filtered list to the original full list.
• Another idea is similar to what Google Mail does.  Under the Search text box display the following:
  • Filter: All, None, Name, Email, Role
  • Black one indicates the current filter in use.  Some Color change would be needed here to indicate the current one being used
    
    

Selecting a Pager design that has the most UCD properties

• a combination of design 1 and design 2
• where you have last, previous and next, last links as text over showing the first 2 and last 2 page numbers. 
• The words place less cognitive load on the user when processing where they are in the pager.  Easier to get to the first or last page with less thought involved.
• Also we felt that the page numbers shown should be a few before and a few numbers after the current page number.  Current page number bolded.

UE Concerns - Design 4

• Design 4
  with the where the user types in the page number we felt was not as user friendly a design as the other designs. 
• First showing the page numbers instead of the input box is less clicking for the user, and seeing visually the page numbers gives a better sense of total scope. 
• Seeing the numbers helps the user determine the scope in a more straight forward manner and less abstractly than the input box.

Slider

• We felt the Slider
  was intuitive for users with alphabetical data.
• Including a filtering list below the slider
  for the various alphabetical columns, would help the user select and know which filter is currently applied and a quick way to change filters.

Additional Ideas

• We also were thinking there might be a way to toggle between a conventional pager  and the slider
• Default perhaps tot the conventional pager and have a link just after the pager "search by alphabetical" or something that if the user clicked, the slider control would replace the pager control.
• This would obviously need user testing to see if even desirable to users.