Searching by name

Here's a suggestion for website developers. If you're going to offer an alphabetical listing on a large or wildly varying set of data, give the user a alphabetical bread crumb trail and not a numerical one. That is, if you have a 1000 listings, don't give the user this:

"1 2 3 4 5 >>" where clicking on the brackets jumps you ahead 5 units and your users have no idea where the end is.

instead, give them something like this:

"A-AF AG-AZ B-BL BM-BZ ... J ... N ... Z >>" where clicking on the brackets jumps ahead to the next logical grouping (in this case, the "J" grouping") or a user can simply click on the nearby letter of choice. Clicking on the '>>' will jump the the grouping forward (or back if clicking on '<<') such as "B ... C ... D ... J-JF JG-JZ K-KF KG-KZ ... N ... Z >>" (after a couple of clicks, for example; effectively, the window that shows the specific letter range slides up and down as the user clicks on the brackets).

This would be overkill for a small data set and not very useful at all for something arranged numerically (which isn't helpful to begin with). But a user would know exactly where he or she was in data set and could easily get to the end of the data set (if he or she was looking for "Zoom" for example) instead of clicking on '>>' until an end was reached.

I've seen some other better variations of the numerical bread crumb trail before (compared to my example), but even then, numbers typically don't match very well with information that is arranged alphabetically. The letter J is the tenth letter of the alphabet; but that does not mean it's the tenth category in data consisting of thousands of entries.

The main point is matching your navigation with your set of data points to help the user get around that much more easy.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]