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Ever noticed how stuff is backwards?
Lee Jordan, modified 4 Years ago.
Ever noticed how stuff is backwards?
Expert Posts: 449 Join Date: 5/26/15 Recent Posts
Being into UX is erm well, it ruins everything honestly. I'm also a film and media studies graduate and I can't enjoy a movie or TV show because I'm marveling over the non-diegetic vs diegetic sound or yet another ingenious Tarantino non-liner time jump. I'm listening to the soundtrack and imagining the sound directors gathered around a playlist in a smoky grungy dive bar.
Sooo ... look at Liferay blogs pagination. Any paging that encompasses time based content. You have to go forwards to go backwards. The older entries are on the next page!! You have to go forward in navigation to go backwards in time. Don't get me wrong it works, but only because we've become conditioned to going the wrong way.
Take message boards, what's the one biggest UX issue with message boards? The threads are sorted latest first, but not the actual replies to a thread. So you get to the latest you have to go backwards further down the page chain. This becomes so entwined that we had to endure the wrong sort order in Content > Web Content for years, because it looked like it was the right order, but time based content is often misunderstood and having the latest at the end often causes complaints, yet we still do it. So next time you're engaging in some sexy linear navigation, which way are you really going?
Swapping the icons? Nope
Take a radio dial, to go to the next station you rotate clockwise which does seem to correspond to the next page arrow, but the result is that you are going forwards. On a webpage? This clicking of the arrow on the right in effect takes you backwards. It's not the placement so much as the wording. Swapping the placement of just the wording in time based paging would seem to be the solution. So you're going backwards through blog posts so the "next arrow" should really say "older posts". Likewise in the other direction, the click is fine but the wording "Previous" is actually taking you forwards; So it should say "newer posts".
Forwards and backwards just doesn't work.
What kind of time based navigation does work? Scrolling works, as you progress down, you're going back down a timeline. So why hasn't time based paging been flipped, that to go backwards in time you go to the previous page? It might just blow some minds!
Sooo ... look at Liferay blogs pagination. Any paging that encompasses time based content. You have to go forwards to go backwards. The older entries are on the next page!! You have to go forward in navigation to go backwards in time. Don't get me wrong it works, but only because we've become conditioned to going the wrong way.
Take message boards, what's the one biggest UX issue with message boards? The threads are sorted latest first, but not the actual replies to a thread. So you get to the latest you have to go backwards further down the page chain. This becomes so entwined that we had to endure the wrong sort order in Content > Web Content for years, because it looked like it was the right order, but time based content is often misunderstood and having the latest at the end often causes complaints, yet we still do it. So next time you're engaging in some sexy linear navigation, which way are you really going?
Swapping the icons? Nope
Take a radio dial, to go to the next station you rotate clockwise which does seem to correspond to the next page arrow, but the result is that you are going forwards. On a webpage? This clicking of the arrow on the right in effect takes you backwards. It's not the placement so much as the wording. Swapping the placement of just the wording in time based paging would seem to be the solution. So you're going backwards through blog posts so the "next arrow" should really say "older posts". Likewise in the other direction, the click is fine but the wording "Previous" is actually taking you forwards; So it should say "newer posts".
Forwards and backwards just doesn't work.
What kind of time based navigation does work? Scrolling works, as you progress down, you're going back down a timeline. So why hasn't time based paging been flipped, that to go backwards in time you go to the previous page? It might just blow some minds!