Designing a Scalable Pagination System

  • Role: Product Designer

    Team: The Washington Post Design System

    Timeframe: Dec 2024 - Jan 2025

  • I led the design of a versatile pagination component for The Washington Post Design System during an 8-day sprint. Working with a lead developer, we addressed inconsistencies across the website where teams created redundant solutions, users faced confusing navigation patterns, and technical debt accumulated.

    We aimed to create a unified, scalable system that works across all content types while being easy to implement. Through research, design exploration, and technical collaboration, I developed four pagination variants with increasing complexity: No Display, Compact, Descriptive, and Numeric. The system is in development and will soon provide consistent navigation while reducing implementation time.

  • The pagination system, now in development for The Washington Post's design system, will deliver significant improvements across our digital platforms.

    This system will provide consistent page navigation with four designs for various needs. Standardizing on one solution will reduce development time. Users will navigate more easily across the site. The responsive system loads efficiently on all devices, serving everything from articles to search results. The standardized structure will also improve SEO by enhancing content indexing.

The challenges without having a pagination component.

Without a standardized pagination component, The Washington Post's digital platform struggled with fragmentation and inconsistency. Our team discovered that the absence of a cohesive approach was creating several challenges:

  • Teams created redundant pagination solutions, causing inconsistent implementations

  • Users encountered conflicting navigation patterns across website sections

  • Multiple pagination versions increased technical debt and maintenance costs

  • Content diversity required a flexible system for both simple and complex pagination needs

Not just a component, but a system.

Looking at the fragmented pagination across our website, we envisioned creating a unified system that would serve as the gold standard for all content navigation. Our aim was to develop a single, versatile pagination component capable of handling everything from simple article navigation to complex data tables. After analyzing user patterns and technical requirements, we established three core objectives:

  • A unified system with an intuitive pagination system that works seamlessly across our entire website

  • Scalability to be utilized for a range of different content while maintaining responsiveness across devices

  • Usability to ensure straightforward integration and seamless adoption by product design and development teams

From exploration to delivery: An 8-day pagination component sprint.

Following design system contribution guidelines, we completed a focused 9-day sprint to build the pagination component. I worked with our lead developer to define requirements, ensure accessibility, and refine the design. Regular check-ins and documentation milestones helped us create a component that met our quality standards and technical needs.

Day 1: Research and Analysis

Together with our design lead, we ran a 1.5-hour kickoff workshop for product design and engineering stakeholders. We audited existing pagination patterns, documented use cases, and defined key interaction patterns and accessibility requirements.

Documentation from our initial workshop combining collaborative brainstorming (left) to define pagination requirements with examples of pagination patterns from other company design system pages and websites (right) to inform our component design approach and accessibility standards.

Day 2 - 3: Design Exploration

Working alongside another product designer, we explored multiple iterations of the pagination component, examining various states, including default, hover, active, and disabled. We focused particularly on mobile interactions and edge cases.

Evolution of the pagination component design, from initial concept exploration and button style adaptation (left) to refined component specifications with detailed anatomy and implementation options (right).

After carefully studying the different use cases and scenarios that our pagination component needed to accommodate, I built and developed four distinct types of pagination variants for our system:

  • No Display: A minimalist design with simple previous/next navigation for basic content flows

  • Compact: Adds streamlined controls while keeping a small footprint

  • Descriptive: Features clear labels and enhanced navigation for better usability

  • Numeric: The most comprehensive option, displaying page numbers and full navigation controls

The Numeric variant was the most sophisticated to build, using complex logic to dynamically display page numbers based on the user's position. It handled various edge cases by showing appropriate ranges near the start and end of content, offering multiple-page skip options, and clearly indicating the total number of available pages.

Pagination component system in Figma showing the main component and the subcomponents, demonstrating increasing complexity while maintaining design and accessibility standards.

I created detailed Figma prototypes showing the pagination component's behavior across different scenarios. Using advanced prototyping features, I demonstrated how the system responds to user interactions, including hover states, active selections, and page transitions. These interactive prototypes helped our development team understand the intended behavior, particularly for complex scenarios like dynamic page updates and content loading states. The prototypes included comprehensive documentation of states, patterns, and accessibility requirements.

Interactive prototype showcasing four pagination variants with increasing complexity: No Display (minimalist UI), Compact (basic controls), Descriptive (labeled navigation), and Numeric (detailed page indicators). Each variant demonstrates its behavior and design patterns in both light and dark modes.

Day 3 - 8: Technical Collaboration

We held regular check-ins with our lead developer to refine the component's architecture. We focused on optimizing performance while maintaining design integrity, addressing state management and load handling.

Day 8: Documentation Development & Handoff

I created comprehensive documentation with usage guidelines, implementation examples, and accessibility requirements to ensure consistent adoption across teams.

Component documentation illustrating the core elements and structure of the pagination system. The anatomy breakdown helps developers and designers understand each interactive element's purpose and relationship within the component.

Result: A better and consistent navigational experience for users.

The pagination system is currently in development and will soon be available on our build.washingtonpost.com site.

We anticipate that site teams will begin implementing this component across various use cases, including section article pages, search results pages, and data visualization interfaces. By providing a unified pagination solution, we expect to see improved navigation consistency, faster implementation times, and enhanced SEO performance across our digital platform. The standardized pagination structure will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index our content effectively.

The component's flexible design and optimized loading patterns make it well-suited for handling different types of content pagination needs. We look forward to gathering feedback from development teams and end users once the component is fully deployed.