Hacker News Reader

Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

One of the more non-obvious issues around pagination, especially with something like a webcomic where you're expecting to view multiple pages, is to have the page layout ensure that the buttons appear in the same place on each page.

This means that you can read the page, click 'next', and not have to move the mouse in order to progress onwards. Also annoying in slide decks and image slideshows.

View on HN

Even better, just allow the user to navigate by hitting the left/right keys. The Atlantic's "In Focus" photo galleries do this, though all the images are on the same page in that case.

It's not always possible to place pagination links at the same location if the webcomic has images of different sizes, but I have yet to see a physical keyboard that moves around depending on what's on the screen.

Using the left/right keys is a great idea, but you'd have to have some clever way of making users aware of it.

You'd also have to come up with a solution that works on devices that don't necessarily have a keyboard available at all times (on iOS, for instance).

wouldn't that translate into a swipe?

You can use a title attribute that displays the shortcut. Desktop applications (such as GIMP) do that all the time

Just don't bind to anything funny, like SMBC did, because it annoys the hell out of keyboard-based browsers users (like, try to copy URL to SMBC comic in Conkeror...).

This is in the Human Interface guidelines for GUI wizards (series of dialog boxes).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com