My current project is a running system that I've been tasked with improving.
The user task is monitoring and adding information, when for example somebody calls on the phone with news. There are several users updating/monitoring information at once, and therefore frequent autoupdate makes perfect sence.
BUT - and here's the catch - the information is structured in several lists, making it necessary to have some kind of pagination on each list. The lists are show in panels arranged to the left and right of a central section. Each panel can be collapsed to show only a headline or expanded to show first page of the list. See http://share.axure.com/2S3G3J/
Right now the autoupdate resets the pagination. This means that if a user has moved to page 2 of a specific list when autoupdate occurs, the list refreshes, and the user is moved to the first page. This offcourse leads to much frustration, but right now I'm uncertain how to avoid it.
My ideas are
- Make autoupdate stay on the selected page and letting new items pushed onto the page get animated in. The items at the bottom that now should belong on the next page either stays and be marked graphically somehow, or pushed off the page in an animation
- Disable autoupdate for the list, when the user has turned to one of the next pages - but when does autoupdate then resume?
- Change pagination for "show more" thus letting the length of the list grow.
It is possible I will be allowed to conduct a small scale user test, but this might not be.
So which solutions would you propose for this issue and why?