An idea I had maybe 9-10 years ago after designing an interface that had a potential for 10s of thousands of database records built into a spreadsheet-style admin page. I proposed this idea after inheriting the traditional UI of navigating through a set number of records per page via numbers that we’ve all seen and used.
My question to the developers was “How does the user know what’s on page 7, for instance?”. The answer was that they don’t until they click on that number. They have to guess that based on 35 records per page you will probably get to your named record in 6-7 pages.
I thought that sucked. I designed this UI that requires the developer to do a little more work to pull a set of records AND pull the first and last record of each theoretical page in the full set in the db – then apply a tooltip-style popup to the number of the page that includes the first and last record visually. Then the user can hover over page 7 and know exactly what they will see, at least the extents first-to-last and make an intelligent decision whether to click there or not.
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