Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
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Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#2Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar.
One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content.
Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) of the content keeps changing (increasing) and thus your position in that content also keeps changing.
I shouldn't have to explain how terrible this is from both accessibility and simple practicality standpoints.
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#3I've never been a big proponent of infinite scrolling even when it was the approach du jour in the early Rails/web 2.0 halcyon days.
But it can work, it's just that nobody has bothered to tinker with the concept very much. It's either/or when it comes to infinite scrolling and click pagination.
The big issues for me are:
- it's never really infinite, it's some finite list that will end at a surprising time. There's rarely any context for how much is ahead of you and behind you. Some sites now will give you little contextual hints (ASOS.com for an example) but often it's opaque.
- leaving all of your previous items on the page. So I'm near the bottom of the list but I have a 4000vh list ahead
Sites that paginate without engagement outside of scroll make the most sense to me, where you get a window of several pages and indication of where you are.
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Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#4> One disadvantage of Load More buttons, compared to classic infinite scrolling, is that interaction cost increases - users have to click the Load More button to load more content. Even the small interruption of clicking Load More might make users consume less content and cause them to switch tasks.
I think this paragraph lets slip the main reason for infinite scrolling: it encourages users to consume more content, and the "load more" button offers an escape hatch that helps users break out of whatever dopamine-loop they are trapped in.
The examples in the article are all relatively benign shopping examples, but infinite scroll is put to far more insidious use on "content" apps.
Pagination fundamentally puts the user in control of where they are within a document, and how they want to move through it. I'm not convinced at all by the Google example of infinite scroll with integrated pagination, because I strongly expect that there is no stability to the inclusion or ordering of the items; if you revisit the same page the next day, there's little guarantee that "page 2" will have the same items, making "page 2" meaningless, and the experience just as disorienting.
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#5Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…
Not only this, but every time it happens I have to wonder how it is that designers have never tried to actually use the scrollbar, getting to the bottom only to have it double in length, the placekeeper jumps out from underneath your cursor, the scrollbar then detects your cursor, and bam, you just skipped half the content without meaning to and it is virtually impossible to get back to where you were. This gets even worse when it isn't a list of entries you're reading but a single very long article or comment thread that should have just been paginated to begin with. It seems entirely motivated by a basic laziness of not wanting to create separate mobile and non-mobile views and defaulting everything to mobile-friendly even if it destroys the browsing experience of people using ordinary desktops and laptops.
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#6Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…
I have seen infinite scroll paradigms that simply load the next bit of content, causing the page to elongate, causing the bar to shrink and reposition. This is fine to me as the bar remains in exact sync with the document.
I also think the scroll bar is an entirely desktop tool, and as infinite scrolling most benefits mobile, this is a moot point. Nobody on mobile uses the scroll bar.
Personally, as a middle-click-and-hold'er, I do not use the scroll bar. I just went through my pages and frankly I'm surprised how the bar looks. I honestly never look at it or use it.
As this article demonstrates the scrolling on mobile as well, I have to point out that your complaints are sadly more of edge cases w.r.t. to the products we're making for the general public.
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#7> One disadvantage of Load More buttons, compared to classic infinite scrolling, is that interaction cost increases - users have to click the Load More button to load more content. Even the small interruption of clicking Load More might make users consume less content and cause them to switch tasks. I think this paragraph lets slip the main reason for infinite scrolling: it encourages users to consume more content, a…
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Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#8Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…
> One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content.
Seems fine to me? New content is appended, so the length and your position changes. Scroll bar reflects what’s going on. What’s the problem?
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#9I'm using a chrome extension to add infinite scroll to HN[1]. It's great.
Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It
#10Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…
On one hand, yes, I agree.
On the other hand, it seems to me that this is partly the fault of the scrollbar as an idea. How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? I still remember an Android PDF viewer which would run through every page of a 2000-page document to get the page dimensions before displaying anything. (From what I can see, modern viewers display the first page instantly by accepting being caught in their lie when a PDF has pages of wildly varying size.) Even a gigabyte of Unicode plain text with no line breaks in a proportional font is a serious problem. I don’t think we can special-case network streaming here (although it’s not unimportant either).