Can we persuade web designers to provide users with simple binary search?
I am constantly frustrated when searching an online shopping outlet and sorting by price.
Suppose there are 1000 items on 50 pages. Instead of the website showing the first, middle and last pages, I find I have to plod through one page at a time to find the price range I'm interested in.
Annoying example
« previous 1 2 … 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 … 129 130 next »
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18963233-person-place-or-thing-last-letter?order=a&page=122
What happens if I want page 50? I invite you to try it.
Pathological example
Here is the display.
https://www.argos.co.uk/list/9-to-12-years-toys/opt/page:6/sort:price/
What if I want page 300? Again I invite you to try.
My solution
Use a classic binary search. Always round down.
< 1 ... 49,50,51 ... 100 >
You click on the ellipsis between the limits you are interested in and you see a new selection. So, suppose I want page 80. I click on the right most ellipsis and get:
< 51 ... 74,75,76 ... 100 >
Then
< 76 ... 87,88,89 ... 100 >
< 76 ... 80,81,82 ... 87 >
Then click on 80.
The whole thing takes 4 clicks. If necessary it can be made more intuitive but if this was adopted as a standard, users would quickly get the hang of it.
Question
Why don't web developers do this? It is a classic binary search and is easy to implement in a dozen lines of code.
Can they be persuaded to?
Notes
Binary search works on sorted arrays. Binary search begins by comparing the middle element of the array with the target value. If the target value matches the middle element, its position in the array is returned. If the target value is less than the middle element, the search continues in the lower half of the array. If the target value is greater than the middle element, the search continues in the upper half of the array. By doing this, the algorithm eliminates the half in which the target value cannot lie in each iteration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm