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Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

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Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#101

Post by Crito »

highace wrote: post #65
davb wrote: post #38

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it. Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page. It just feels... icky.

It's worse than that. At least with the book you get to turn the page. This is more like having a book, and knowing there's other pages, but you can never get to the bottom of the page you're on.

It's like a springloaded scroll that spools out of an opaque cylinder case like some sort of measuring tape. One mis-step and you have to spend minutes slowly pulling it back out again.

Meanwhile all the stuff you have already read is sitting around in a big mess, doing nothing but taking up space and getting in the way.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#102

Post by Crito »

mindrag wrote: post #46
davb wrote: post #38

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it. Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page. It just feels... icky.

There's an elegant way to add some sort of progress indicator to infinite scroll. I just haven't figured it out yet :)

Have a little screen overlay that displays how much memory your browser is using. As it climbs higher and higher, you'll know that you are making progress.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#104

Post by louthy »

faddotio wrote: post #103

Designers: please stop it with infinite scroll. They are painful to work with and work around. When a service switches to infinitely scrolling lists, I stop using it.

Designers: Please continue to use infinite scroll where it's appropriate, it is much better than pagination much of the time, especially on mobile devices.

When a service sticks with pagination (like Amazon's movie service) I stop using it.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#105

Post by stickhandle »

I'm not a fan of infinite scroll in the main, but there are use cases for it. I've often thought search results would be a good candidate. The don't suffer from the need to provide user feedback on progress of completion. I also think it provides Google with more ad opportunites including placing them within the infinite scroll at some interval, and, of course, the highly prized sticky ad ;) [edit - wanted to add that it would also lessen the blow of being on p2 ... in fact I would expect search users to frequently get deeper into the results yielding an improved feedback loop]

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#106

Post by Springtime »

stickhandle wrote: post #105

I'm not a fan of infinite scroll in the main, but there are use cases for it. I've often thought search results would be a good candidate. The don't suffer from the need to provide user feedback on progress of completion . I also think it provides Google with more ad opportunites including placing them within the infinite scroll at some interval, and, of course, the highly prized sticky ad ;) [edit - wanted to add th…

I've been using a userscript [1] for the past year that adds the feature to search results and the like. Huge improvement, and with a little custom CSS styling the additional pages are appended more seamlessly.

The feature I appreciate about this particular userscript is it's clear where the page breaks are, and adds links to each newly appended page, allowing the user to link directly to them - which would be useful to see in more infinite scroll implementations, and seen used in the main HN link.

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121191 [1a] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/164782

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#107

Post by ma2rten »

davb wrote: post #38

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it. Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page. It just feels... icky.

This demo actually has pages.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#108

Post by _greim_ »

smoyer wrote: post #62
jakub_g wrote: post #59

I would feel kind of okay with infinite scroll if it wasn't creating memory problems. Especially on image-heavy (tumblr) / DOM-heavy (facebook) pages. If I browsed the web in 90s mode (one window, one page opened) that would maybe work, but when I have dozens of tabs opened, youtube playing in background and I start browsing an endless memory-hungry page, my laptop (3 GB RAM) starts dying. Another issue is the one me…

Google's Wave used (and reused) a fixed number of DOM elements that were filled by fly-weights containing the data to be shown on that page. While the scroll bar showed the appropriate position in the thread, there was a limited amount of data for the items above and below the visible set, and an even more limited number of DOM elements that could be filled with data.

Wave didn't strike me as the most performant of client-side webapps, but certainly may have been ahead of its time in terms of what it was trying to do. I wonder if browsers could make this sort of thing easier, or even automatic. Querying the positions relative to viewport of elements on scroll is expensive, even using throttling.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#109

Post by _greim_ »

georgemcbay wrote: post #49
davb wrote: post #38

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it. Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page. It just feels... icky.

I wish to join your infinite scroll haters club. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's "Ian Malcolm" in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your front-end developers were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." I personally find infinite scroll to be far worse than cleanly paginated pages in every regard. YMMV, I guess.

The hangup with pagination is even if it can be done well, most people associate it with a full page reload, often very slow, often because of ads.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#110

Post by syntern »

lubujackson wrote: post #5

It still jumps around if you hold and drag the scrollbar - always my complaint with these.

I'm working on an infinite-scroll widget, and I have a very specific insight into this: if you know the number of non-visible rows and their heights upfront, it can be implemented in a way that doesn't jump around. If you can estimate the heights closely, you can make the jumps less disturbing (but still noticeable in the trained eyes).

Unfortunately this is rarely the case, with a few exceptions, e.g. a spreadsheet, where you know everything upfront.

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