Web page design - number of pages and user experience

Question

I am just starting a project and the wireframes are ready. But looking at the wireframes it seems that the primary goal was to reduce the number of pages and to include maximum functionality in to a single page.

Taking an example of an organization, the top portion of the page will show the organization details, below that at the left we have an division structure as a tree view, clicking on a division will populate the employee list on the right as a table, and when you click on an employee it will populate the employee details below.

Current wireframe looks something like this:

End user is happy as they can see the entire functionality on a single page and doesn't need to navigate to another page.

But this design reminds me the screen of some old desktop application and I feel that this page is unnecessarily complex- I want to split this in to multiple pages (at least in to three). Also, I am using MVC 4 and splitting this in to multiple pages will definitely help me to reduce the complexities during implementation.

But before arriving at any conclusion and raising any concern, I would like to know what you guys think. Some articles related to User experience are also welcome.

Answer 1

Here's what I think.

Whether the design above is 'right' depends on the target audience and the type of work / business process they need to carry out. There may be a strong business argument for being able to see all the information (org details, divisions, employees and employee details) on one page. It is not unusual to see a lot of information displayed in a page with a lot of interactivity - users expectations have increased because of consumer sites such as Gmail. The users might find it frustrating if it was broken out into different pages.

To put it another way, I don't think there is a valid technical justification for making the designer change the UI above to split it into different pages.

You would be able to build the UI above in MVC as a single page web application. You will probably need to implement a lot of controller actions to support ajax calls. You're almost certainly going to end up using a lot of JQuery and you are probably also going to end up with a significant amount of JavaScript to write. Also, you'll need to make sure the designer has made good decisions around the sizing of the page. Is it going to be fixed width or dynamic for instance? You'll need to emit well structured HTML in order to achieve that solely using CSS (which I would strongly advise you do).