(2012-05-14) Digital Pagination Design

There's frequent discussion/debate about page-turning/scrolling in digital content, esp when long-form (long articles up to EBook-s), esp in TouchScreen devices (Tablet-s, etc.). Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content.

Nate Barham thinks that this mental interruption helps the brain process what it has been reading. I Commented that this seems crazy, given that the "page" break often comes in the middle of a sentence: *Given that the articles/books we're talking about are often mostly text, I think there's some value in having a visibly-interruptive action happening, to confirm that you actually made a turn happen (sometimes you feel like your eyes are tricking you).

Taking inspiration from your "stop for a breath" model, how about taking the paragraph that's going to be split by the page-end, and showing only the first line of it on the current page (leaving whitespace), then when you page forward you get that first line with the rest of the paragraph. Hmm, in fact, maybe it makes sense to have the whitespace come between the end of the last full paragraph and that widow line....*