Firstly, a paged interface is a terrible idea. You can’t see the current incumbents in the top positions, you can’t see the range of players you can challenge and you get no sense of scale or progress. Honestly, the list is not so long that you can’t just show the whole thing. At the very least, show everyone ABOVE the user’s position - optionally collapsing the range between the top 10 and the top of the user’s challenge window.
Secondly, the process of challenging appears to be operated by alert() windows! Those are always a bad idea and, particularly so, in this case. If you must pop up windows, use jQuery dialogs or overlays that appears somewhere near the place the user clicked the challenge button and are easily readable.
Personally I was relieved by the pagination. I get a sense if progress from my rank and I was very pleased not to have to scroll all over the place hunting for myself in the list!
I hadn’t noticed the popups either. Do you mean the actual old fashioned alert boxes? I remember being asked whether or not I wanted to be taken to the newly created game - if that’s what you mean then I agree; a bit pointless!
I agree that the pages are terrible. Say you are viewing page 1 of a ladder with 50 pages. If you want to see who’s in the middle of the ladder on page 25, the only way to get there is to manually click on the page navigation buttons.
Searching for players was already simple enough when everything was on one page. Simply using ctrl+f worked fine.
Well, the only way to get there is - hmmm, why am I checking who’s half way along the ladder anyway?
I only care about where I am and who I can challenge. Now if I load the ladder page I’m at the top, nice and easy to find, rather than hacking to scroll to some undisclosed location 'cause I can’t remember my rank relative to how many people may be in the ladder (is rank 200 half way or near the top? Who knows?)
Now I want someone to challenge… So I click on the previous page until a suitably ranked pseudo victim appears. Where’s the big deal? I read there was a complete disaster happening somewhere!
We should jump you to your current location in the ladder, does this not happen? Viewing the top of the list should be as easy as clicking the first page?
I might agree that we should find a better way to present it in such a way that it makes it easier to narrow in on where you are and who you can challenge.
We went with a paginated display because of how heavy an operation the act of displaying the list of users is including the games they are playing, and whether or not they are challengeable by you and why not (if not).
In some cases this list is very long… thousands of players long. Having them all on one page is just not tenable.
In that case, how about a list of all the games I am playing in this ladder, including opponents’ ladder position
or even better: a subset of the ladder containing the top 10, players that are available for me to challenge, my position and, challanges that I am playing.
The full ladder could be on a separate page, without the challenge buttons etc.