Mobile, "Show Remaining" or "Show All"?

Question

In a mobile screen I have n data items in collection, but I am limited to show first 3 or 4 items from it. For the rest I can put a button below 3rd or 4th item which can lead my user to a popup where I can show other data from that collection in a list.

Taking into consideration that the data presented in list will reflect the text on button, what should be the text on button say? Show Remaining(=Show X more) or Show All?

What are the benefits/drawbacks for each approach?

Edit: I am divided between these two approaches and need to know what community thinks about each approach from designer's point of view and from user's point of view.

Answer 1

You could show the first 3 or 4 items and, if there are more, add a bottom at the bottom Show more or simply More.... Every time it is pressed you load other 3 or 4 items that are appended to the list.

This kind of solution would work optimally if the items in the collection are somehow ordered by relevance.

If the items are not ordered and the user has to inspect all of them, having to press the button repeatedly would be an annoyance so infinite scrolling or pagination would work better I'd say.

UPDATE: if the popup is paramount I prefer the wording Show All because Show Remaining is confusing (I would ask myself if the popup will show also the items already on the screen or not)

Answer 2

'Show remaining' would be the equivalent of catering for someone that have first done some browsing and then decides that they want to see everything that they haven't seen before (i.e. remaining). People can already do that by looking at the item below the last one that they've seen, so there is no real need for that.

I would suggest using 'show all' when you want to see all the content without pagination. It may be useful to keep the current position here, so that if I am on page 3 and choose 'show all' that I don't have to start at the top of the list again, however this can also be problematic, so it's worth testing.

Using 'more' is another option for when you want simple pagination of a list, and you simply load more content at the bottom of the list. Typically this is where users will not have any reason to go to page 45 and will simply browse the list sequentially. Think of it as the manual version of infinite scrolling. I would usually suggest infinite scrolling over this, which is easier for most people to use.