Is it a good experience if a table pagination doesn't refresh the whole page but only its own area

Question

I'm working on a UI pattern thing for an ERP system. the problem is about the table pagination.a common table have a pagination, I'm fine with that.

Here is the problem, if there is a lot of content in a data entry page, fields, combo boxes, and one or more tables. It's pretty sure if one of these tables have a pagination, it should only refresh its own section but not the whole page.

But I think the original affordance of pagination is to switch the page, the whole page, which therefore exists the conflict.

Now I think the key depends on the visual affordance of the table section. if it's a separated area, I can treat the whole page as a desk and the table area as a independent book. So in this case, it does make sense the pagination just refresh it own section.

But from the point of "I'm defining the generic UI pattern", what should I do? Now I would prefer to define the rules that "It's extremely not recommended to have pagination when the table is not the only content in the page", Since now we don't have the "mass-record-table nested in a data entry page" requirement yet.

What do you guys think?

Answer 1

If the pagination only affects a particular data set then it needs to be visually indicated that the pagination buttons and the content falls in the same group. Defining accordance and expectations with visual clues like boundary or color shared are to be used in this case.

It is always a good practice to have different pagination for different data set or tables if the tables are not interlinked. Refreshing the whole page is not recommended as the user expects that the data needs to be paginated and not the complete UI. As for a visual clue that new set of data is being loaded, try using a simple UI element like spinner which animated to indicate that something is being worked on.

I hope this solves and answers your question.