Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

nngroup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 175 posts

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#121

Post by grogers »

Dalewyn wrote: post #2

Infinite 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…

Scrollbar hasn't been useful for that (at least for me) ever since websites started putting comments after the content (e.g. article, blog)

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#122

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

sodapopcan wrote: post #19
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #12

Infinite scrolling makes the contents of the page unlinkable, breaks searchability and caching. It always makes the experience worse for unclear benefits. What's the problem it solves? Not resending the header and the footer on changing pages? Really?

Pagination also makes things unlinkable, though. Not that I’m not necessarily defending infinite scrolling, but it’s a tough problem.

Display ascending, ID descending, index redirects to the highest ID and becomes page 2/Max(ID)-1 when filled. So tough.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#123

Post by fredguth »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42
seydor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also breaks the "virtual scrollbar". if you reload the page you have to start all over

This is my primary issue with infinite scrolling. However, I wonder if it’s mostly a problem with today’s web browsers. Heck—maybe it’s not even browsers, but websites. I’m pretty sure a website could change the URL as you scroll, so if the page is reloaded (or bookmarked, etc) you’re brought back to where you left off. I usually dislike it when websites mess with URLs, but this seems like an excellent use case!

Discourse is a web app that does that. The url should be the place to keep navigational state.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#124

Post by bmicraft »

xorcist wrote: post #57
Dalewyn wrote: post #2

Infinite 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…

It also breaks the find button. The item you wanted to search might get unloaded, or not loaded yet, in some bizarre attempt at optimization when the javascript library resposible is an order of magnitude larger than the actual content anyway. My phone has gigabytes of memory. If you want to present five hundred items in a web shop, just list them and do not bother with any type of pagination, invisible or otherwise.

I find spotify is really bad with unloading ui, to the point where you have to stop and wait to see song titles if you are scrolling even moderately fast

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#125

Post by adhesive_wombat »

Tagbert wrote: post #103
xorcist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also breaks the find button. The item you wanted to search might get unloaded, or not loaded yet, in some bizarre attempt at optimization when the javascript library resposible is an order of magnitude larger than the actual content anyway. My phone has gigabytes of memory. If you want to present five hundred items in a web shop, just list them and do not bother with any type of pagination, invisible or otherwise.

It also breaks the “back” button. If you click on an item after significant scrolling, view the item, then click back, where are you? almost never where you were. Usually just at the top of the list.

Jira goes one better. Issues in some lists are paginated into 50s. Change to "page 2", use the back button and you'll be back on the page you were on before looking at the list, because the URL hasn't changed. Go forward again and you're back at the first page. Argh!

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#126

Post by flenserboy »

There should always be an option to paginate. As others have said, the user-hostility is significant on any infinite scroll — one side-product of this is the refusal of apps/sites such as Twitter (sometimes) or Facebook to stay where the user left off, reloading the page when the app or page is returned to. (One other truly hostile aspect of such sites: the user's choice of display order, especially on Twitter, is rarely respected, returning always to what the site believes to be most advantageous to itself. User settings should never be changed remotely, or without user approval.)

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#127

Post by spookthesunset »

dylan604 wrote: post #113
xorcist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also breaks the find button. The item you wanted to search might get unloaded, or not loaded yet, in some bizarre attempt at optimization when the javascript library resposible is an order of magnitude larger than the actual content anyway. My phone has gigabytes of memory. If you want to present five hundred items in a web shop, just list them and do not bother with any type of pagination, invisible or otherwise.

the lack of not being able to find something not yet loaded or recently unloaded is infuriating to me. I file shitty pagination systems with no Show All in the same category.

The “find” thing is something I hadn’t considered. Yes it’s annoying when you cant search content “below the fold”

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#128

Post by lelandfe »

Dalewyn wrote: post #111
lelandfe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'll bite. How is a growing scrollbar bad for accessibility? Why is an understanding of how long a page is an accessibility concern?

Because not everyone has the hand-eye coordination and/or motor skills to keep track of an arbitrarily changing scroll bar, particularly the elderly and the disabled. An accurate and consistent scroll bar is a valuable navigation tool, please don't break it.

Hm. Do the the elderly and the disabled keep track of the scroll bar length? Does it getting longer actually confuse people? I'm not convinced this is as important of a thing.

Opening modals changes the scrollbar length. Opening accordions do too. The scrollbar doesn't "break" when content is added to a page, it just adjusts accordingly. It seems like this is all good, expected behavior; not an a11y concern.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#130

Post by WaitWaitWha »

Never; the time to use infinite scrolling is never.

Specifically, infinite scrolling, where the remaining/invisible data is not loaded until getting towards the end of the loaded segment.

For the visually impaired infinite scrolling breaks search and text-to-speach tools.

A better solution is give the option to paginate with the set size, 25, 50, 1000, or whatever; or load the entire list in one shot.

Post reply on HN