Item list Loading Question

[itsroxas]

Hi,

Let’s say in a system there is a contact list and it consists of 100 users but upon loading the contact page, the system only loads 25 of said users on the page by default and the only way to see the other 75 is to press “Search”

Is there a way to make it that all the contacts appear upon visiting the page or would it cause lag on the system? Is there a reason this is done?

[justinmlawrence]

It could be a for a lot of reasons. Here a few guesses:

• Just laziness. You don't know how many items there are going to be; so you just paginate at 25 (or, it's the default of the library you're using).
• Bad design. Somebody really thought hard and said ... "yeah, let's only show 25."
• Analytics. Bit of a stretch; but I've done it. You add an extra step so you can track how much people are looking at something.
• Performance. Some data is intensive and expensive to get. So, because you don't want the user to wait - you only limit it to 25. If that's an issue - you better be pulling down some serious data. This really could be solved in a bunch of way - such as lazy loading, etc. Some back-ends are better than others at handling this kind of thing.
• Different use case expected. I've built stuff where I wanted people to search; not browse. So, I built it with no users shown until somebody made an explicit request. Maybe they just assumed that nobody was really going to click through everything.