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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

#141

Post by tsimionescu »

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.

tail -f considered harmful?

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

#143

Post by nashashmi »

After reading the comments and taking everyone's input, here are a couple of points:

* infinite scrolling turns webpages into web apps yet not everyone likes or expects web apps;

* infinite scrolling fails to tell people when they reached the end and this is frustrating;

* infinite scrolling fails to tell people how far along they have consumed the content, or how far back is the top bar;

* infinite scrolling breaks the basics of UI tools (no scrollbar, no end key, no home key)

* infinite scrolling should never be other than a gesture for more (scroll for more)

* infinite scrolling should still allow for going "back" e.g. either it scrolls back up and/or allows for going back to the beginning.

* infinite scrolling should have an "end" e.g. a bar at the bottom that phases away when scrolling further down and then appears at the next end.

* infinite scrolling is a bad habit for more, and may be should be discouraged e.g. electrocute the user every time he asks for more /s

I hope you agree.

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

#144

Post by lelandfe »

Dalewyn wrote: post #132
lelandfe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

> eliminate such behaviour because being disrupted and disoriented like that is really unpleasant

This appears to be postulation on your part rather than actual knowledge of accessibility needs.

The specter of "visually changing things are bad" may hold some water (WCAG requirements do include things along those lines), but in order to discourage folks from using common web components I'd definitely need to see some actual evidence of this phenomenon w.r.t scrolling.

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

#145

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

RunSet wrote: post #17
mananaysiempre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

Scrollbars can be dynamically updated as the content is processed. This is also a distinct advantage of a proportional sized scollbar elevator like those in Windows since the elevator shrinks to its final size rather then starting at a small fixed size and shifting around.

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

#146

Post by mikotodomo »

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…

> 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

And how would you do that when there is infinite scroll?

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

#147

Post by joegahona »

stemlord wrote: post #119
d0gbread wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do. I have sometimes used services where I prefer having infinite scroll. I sometimes prefer it.

In what contexts do you prefer it? As others have said it breaks findability, default browser nav (back then forward again you have to start over or watch it gracelessly attempt to autoscroll back down 600 posts and often fail), renders the scrollbar visually near-meaningless, detrimental to performance, and seems to largely be utilized just to maximize scroll time on visibility driven ad platforms, like all popular…

I would prefer my main feed on Twitter to be infinite scroll.

Pagination can be "weaponized" too -- note the awful publishers such as WebMD who break articles up into a billion pages, to increase pageviews and hence ad impressions.

Incidentally I prefer pagination for taxonomy pages and search-results pages, because it puts navigation more in my hands.

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

#148

Post by Zak »

spookthesunset wrote: post #64
marginalia_nu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still have weird issues with pagination if the data set you're paging through is mutable. Reddit used to struggle with this back in the day. The way they did pagination was to say "show the next page after id postId=xyz123". Since the algorithm kept re-sorting the posts on the front page, the content moved around quite a lot and you'd see the same things re-appearing on page after page, and sometimes post xyz…

Infinite scroll or not you’ll have this problem on a mutable set of items. You’ll have to dedupe the next “page” either client side or server side. Or something! It’s one of the reasons that the “I can build XYZ app in a weekend” crowd sounds so silly. I bet Reddit spent dozens of not hundreds of man-months nailing their scrolling behavior. It probably took many iterations of UX, product and engineering to get it rig…

IIRC the first version of reddit and the Python rewrite were each more or less built in a weekend. They were neither scalable to millions of users nor heavily optimized to keep users on the site as long as possible.

The latter point is relevant to a variety of UX decisions across many products and services. Making it easy, efficient, and pleasant for the user to do what the user wants may not be the overriding concern in the design.

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

#149

Post by Schroedingersat »

nashashmi wrote: post #143

After reading the comments and taking everyone's input, here are a couple of points: * infinite scrolling turns webpages into web apps yet not everyone likes or expects web apps; * infinite scrolling fails to tell people when they reached the end and this is frustrating; * infinite scrolling fails to tell people how far along they have consumed the content, or how far back is the top bar; * infinite scrolling breaks…

There's also the bit where you put important contact, privacy, or similar information below the infinite scrolling element so it's only reachable via debug tools or turning the internet off (the latter doesn't always work because it often results in an 'oopsie wooopsie somefing went wong' error popup).

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

#150

Post by romwell »

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.

It's not useless for the user who has accidentally closed the page or clicked the "back" button.

Or wants to send a link right now to be opened right now ("Hey honey, which one of these things should I get?").

Links are inherently ephemeral: content changes and expires, and there's nothing that guarantees against that. Doesn't make them useless.

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