The "Show" (per page) Drop-Down: Sleepwalking Vestige

Why would anyone ever want to see fewer than the maximum number of results per page when browsing/shopping for resources? Surely this is a vestige from dial-up days and slow-page-loading, and programmers keep sleepwalking it into the site templates.

There must be some reason for the survival of this feature. Maybe I'm missing some artistic or behavioral aspect, but to me it's just annoying.

Certainly this isn't particular to Logos.com.

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SineNomine

Why would anyone ever want to see fewer than the maximum number of results per page when browsing/shopping for resources?

Faithlife serves an international customer base. A real percentage of its customers have slow and/or capped Internet access.

Also, most targeted searches (for authors, titles, series) return the desired result(s) within the first fifteen results anyway.

Glenn Airoldi (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/817956#Comment_817956

One of the ways we provide user friendly page load times is to limit the number of results we display by default.

In the logos.com example, consider what it takes to display a single price in search results. We must identify who has authenticated, calculate a dynamic price for the product based on license records for that authenticated user and the contents of the collection being displayed, then apply and calculate any eligible discount. Once that's done, we look up and apply a currency conversion if the authenticated user has a preference other than $ US. We need to repeat this for every product on the page, and then apply a sort order, which is often dependent on the calculated price. Then, we can finally load the page for the user to view.

Doing these calculations for 15 products is noticeably quicker than doing it for 150. (And pricing is only one of the things that's happening on the page. [:)] )