Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by Dalewyn » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #112

Dalewyn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you need to coordinate your hand and eye to use a scroll bar? Don’t you use touch to scroll or a scroll wheel?

Clicking/touching the scroll bar and dragging it directly is a valid way of using a scroll bar. Especially for people who come from a time when mice didn't have scroll wheels, clicking and dragging the scroll bar itself predates the convenience of whole-screen dragging (touch) and flicking the scroll wheel.

Dragging the scroll bar has its benefits over touch/wheel too: It allows for quicker, longer distance travel with fewer (and in the sense that you just move your arm, also simpler) movements.

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

#132

Post by Dalewyn » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:11 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #128

Dalewyn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of us take for granted the fact we are all still physically and mentally fit (and also know how to operate computers!). Inevitably though, age will catch up to us one day.

Particularly for the elderly and disabled, but honestly pretty much anyone not familiar with using computers, elements of the user interface suddenly changing seemingly at random is extremely disruptive and disorienting. In the spirit of accesibility, as an engineer you want to eliminate such behaviour because being disrupted and disoriented like that is really unpleasant.

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

#133

Post by bartread » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:12 PM UTC

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #125

Tagbert wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Gah! Breaking basic navigation functionality, along with the clipboard, on page search functionality (i.e., basic application and OS level stuff), keyboard navigation, and common keyboard shortcuts and mouse/touch gestures, are amongst the absolute cardinal sins of web applications. These ought to be acceptance criteria for every single "story" implemented that impacts the client-side. Does anybody do it? Well, some, but very few.

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

#134

Post by awinter-py » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

> lack of landmarks to help users orient themselves. With pagination, users may remember the page that an item was on and that an item was close to the top of the page or towards the middle, but in an infinite list of items, it is hard to remember the location of any specific item and return to it.

> especially disruptive for the user experience when websites do not save the user’s spot in the list during pogo sticking. Frequently, users will click on an item in the infinite list or feed to go to its detail page and, when they come back, using the Back button, they will find themselves at the top of the list

^ cmon this is just the design spec for the twitter web UX

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

#135

Post by dalmo3 » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #88

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…

Infinite scrolling is bad because it has ZERO respect for document boundaries. An "infinite" document is a travesty.

Define document. Is a log file a document? How would you render a log file in real time without some sort of streaming (i.e. infinite scrolling)?

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

#136

Post by awinter-py » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

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.

yeah the nielsen article calls this 'pogo sticking'

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

#137

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

sodapopcan wrote: post #59

donohoe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, no. Pagination absolutely makes things linkable. Again, details matter here, but it is easily solvable.

"Um, yes". As a catalog grows, past items get pushed to later pages making page-linking useless.

This is assuming things are added to the front of the catalog and not the back.

That's the usual default, but there are usually sort options along with pagination that can make an items place in a list more or less fixed.

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

#138

Post by lupire » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:23 PM UTC

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…

Expand your perspective: What does scroll bar mean when you have no intention of ever scrolling all the content?

"Infinite" scroll isn't breaking anything, the content all broke scrolling inherently.

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

#139

Post by lupire » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

> Even the small interruption of clicking Load More might make users consume less content and cause them to switch tasks.

In other words, infinite scrolling promotes addictive behavior.

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

#140

Post by irthomasthomas » Sat, Sep 10, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #10

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…

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 wha…

  "How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? "

Actually, that sounds like an idea, make the height of the page roughly the real height of the total pages. It can still load content on scroll, but being able to leap ahead a few pages sounds great. Now if we can just get it to remember our position when we hit back, and not just return us to the beginning of the adventure, then infinite scroll would be tolerable.