Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling • Hacker News Board

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#111

Post by wruza » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 6:51 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #27

longrod wrote: post #15

I wish this was made impossible by browsers. It's like making a user chase their tail; they won't ever catch it. They just keep going in circles until they explode with frustration. You can't even cancel the requests to load more data. I have come across a couple of these (I think blogs & news sites do this) and it is so annoying.

It’s possible I’m lacking imagination after ~20 years of web dev experience, but I can’t think of a way to systematically prevent this. I can hardly even think of a heuristic to detect it which wouldn’t be either overly broad or overly specific. A spec which privileged more of a page’s “chrome” as part of the browser UX would probably make that more realistic, at the expense of being a very high value attack surface.…

Yeah, discouraging and shaming always works. Many of examples out there.

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#112

Post by Aeolun » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 7:09 AM UTC

iostream24 wrote: post #83

Aeolun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’m inclined to say his message could be conveyed with just half of all the words in the original blog post.

Who knows. The page is down and 90% of is never got to read the article but the title sounds appealing. Well, just position:fixed; bottom:0; your footer and make sure your scrollY - element.height or whatever has an offset to account for the footer. Pity the site is down. Can’t read the article. It could be about conniving cheese merchants and their never ending battle for umami supremacy ffs, how should I know.

Original content of the post, minus the title, which you can read on HN, was:

Just don’t. (2 words)

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#113

Post by psYchotic » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 7:46 AM UTC

wruza wrote: post #106

productceo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A professional medical doctor will make more medical mistakes than I will. Let us try our best to treat them charitably, forgive the mistakes we see, and provide input to help them do their work even better! I had success working with Design/UX or any other specialists acknowledging that they spent more time thinking about it than I have, and that, of course, they will be the final decision makers on whether to accep…

A professional medical doctor will make much less medical mistakes than you will in a medical field.

You probably misunderstood: gp won't make mistakes in a medical field because he's not a medical professional, so he won't do anything in the medical field.

The same sometimes applies to designers and developers: if developers don't design, then of course they won't make bad designs.

The gist of it all is: don't ridicule people for mistakes, even if they're in their supposed field of expertise. Just let them know they've made a mistake if you see one.

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#114

Post by 88913527 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 8:00 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #58

Who makes these decisions really? HN tends to be more developer focused but I suspect most of these horrendous type decisions aren't made by random dev, and random dev isn't in a position to stop it. Many years ago I once worked at a place where a CRM app had "special instructions" and at one point management was so upset about people not following them 100% of the time they were considering "make them blink" so the…

The most common thing is nobody owns the decision. Someone (an engineer) chose an implementation detail and nobody thought about it any sooner. Then these things pile up in interesting ways over time. Rarely is it "the engineers hands were tied". Barely anybody is telling the engineer what to do in the first place, mostly due to a lack of proper requirement gathering since the software is always considered to be "shipped late" in perpetuity by the business, so who has time to properly plan?

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#115

Post by wruza » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

psYchotic wrote: post #113

wruza wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A professional medical doctor will make much less medical mistakes than you will in a medical field.

You probably misunderstood: gp won't make mistakes in a medical field because he's not a medical professional, so he won't do anything in the medical field. The same sometimes applies to designers and developers: if developers don't design, then of course they won't make bad designs. The gist of it all is: don't ridicule people for mistakes, even if they're in their supposed field of expertise. Just let them know the…

I see ggp point as a beatiful love-speech in a context that is completely different from what was discussed.

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#116

Post by tasuki » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:02 AM UTC

evnp wrote: post #85

Should read "Don't place footers below infinite scroll." I appreciate the brevity but this fails to notice the nuance, and ends up being too reductive to be useful advice. Footers can work just fine combined with infinite scroll, eg. https://radiopaper.com/explore on desktop (disclosure, I am one of the authors). That said, paying attention to how UX/features interact is something we should always strive to do more o…

That took me a while to find out. Also, I had to read the entire about page to understand Radiopaper, but I like this idea a lot!

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#117

Post by codeflo » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:20 AM UTC

I wish this also contained an alternative suggestion. Where else should I hide the link to the privacy statement and the button for opting out of data collection?

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#118

Post by PoignardAzur » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:40 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #63

wtallis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from a handful of web applications (like Google Maps), I struggle to think of a good reason for sites to be able to observe or hijack scrolling behavior. That capability is abused far more often that it actually leads to improved usability, and I don't think the web in general would suffer from sites being denied that power by default.

I understand your perspective but for you and anyone else reading, here’s a more familiar analysis. Maps apps don’t make much use of scroll APIs at all, they tend to use pointer events (and/or their older mouse equivalents). When they do it’s almost always auto-panning to some item in a more traditional results list, and always a horrible experience. Apart from infinite scroll, the most common uses of scroll-related…

I mean... a lot of your examples boil down to "With enough JS, we can smooth over the problems created by all the JS we added!"

This approach is why Reddit is extremely janky on mobile, while HN is perfectly smooth. Opening a new page on Reddit takes up to 10 seconds; moving back to the previous page up to 5 seconds. Meanwhile, both are almost instant on HN.

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#119

Post by kgeist » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:40 AM UTC

lucasyvas wrote: post #71

productceo wrote: post #50

I once shipped a new product, and was surprised to receive no negative feedback from users regarding content quality. Happens out, UX team placed the "Send Feedback" button below the infinite scroll content feed.

It's hilarious to me that the Design/UX team is always the one making mistakes like this where I've worked. We're just sitting there saying, even from a non-code point of view, this shit makes zero sense. Ignored as usual.

I've witnessed it multiple times during our UI/UX meetings that the engineers present there (representatives of the engineering team are invited too, to tell whether it's going to work with our current architecture/deadlines etc.) often give more insightful feedback/criticism on UX than the other members on the UI/UX team (why the stuff looks crappy, makes no sense, hard to use etc.)

I think the reason is, devs view a design from the perspective of a simple user, they see it with fresh eyes, while the UI/UX team probably spent too much time tweaking the design to the point they got used to it and all its quirks and stopped seeing anything wrong with it.

Re: Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling

#120

Post by atoav » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #58

Who makes these decisions really? HN tends to be more developer focused but I suspect most of these horrendous type decisions aren't made by random dev, and random dev isn't in a position to stop it. Many years ago I once worked at a place where a CRM app had "special instructions" and at one point management was so upset about people not following them 100% of the time they were considering "make them blink" so the…

Oh, I have worked as a freelance graphic designer once. Design is one of those fields where customer interaction can absolutely destroy any fun the profession would otherwise contain: everybody (and I mean everybody) has an opinion on design. The problem is, that many of those opinions are as uninformed as they are held strongly.

"Just make everything bigger" is one of those opinions. At the point where you have to explain your customer how basic perception works, how you cannot make everything equally important without sacrificing something — this is the point where you lost.