The scroll bar things is such a serious issue i would never consider using infinite scroll until that is dealt with on a browser level.
Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#42Without going point by points to counter every reason I would like to say I absolutely love continuous scrolling when I am shopping or looking at items on a retailers website. >Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. This is entirely untrue I can still use my scrollbar to get back to the top of the page again, it can also be used to easily skim the results that were display…
I really don't like continuous scrolling for retail shopping. its easier to remember what page something was on than a relative position. I don't mind it for pointless content consumption like Reddit and Facebook, because I rarely ever want to go back to something on those platforms.
I can see your point.
The best use I have seen is a hybrid approach. Load 10 or so out of 100 items, use continuos scroll to show the remanding 90 and then use pagination to access the other results.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#43All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
Served!! Ha ha
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#44All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
What's the benefit? It seems like you've gone though a lot of trouble re-implementing features of the browser but without any obvious advantage in doing so.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#45All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
What's the benefit? It seems like you've gone though a lot of trouble re-implementing features of the browser but without any obvious advantage in doing so.
It's really nice to be able to read something without interruption.
In terms of engagement, a user is much more likely to bail every time you require them to perform an action like click "next page." On Discourse they can just keep scrolling down as long as they care to read.
It also helps to track their position. On long topics, users often won't read it all in one sitting. I am a member of the Something Awful forums, and since they use vBulletin with pagination they can only know if I've opened a page and they use that to mark the whole segment of 20 posts as read. What if I stopped half way through? What if I opened the page in a new tab then closed my browser without looking at it? They assume I've read it all!
Logically, what is a "page" anyway and why should a user care about it? What does page 669 mean versus 670? How about we not expose implementation details to users and just let them get on with their reading?
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#46All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
Excellent response.
Yet I feel compelled to ask: how much effort was invested in reaching such degree of finesse?
Pagination is (usually) very easy to implement and can be done completely on the server side. Your (very magnificent) solution sounds like it would require days, if not weeks, to be implemented, and adds plenty of javascript to the server-side part.
Do you think there's a "economy class" infinite scroll, or is it only viable for sites with a big budget (in effort at least)?
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#47As always it's never that simple. Infinite scroll is great for browsing images. That's whats it's always been good for.
Except it's not. Those image loads start to bring a heavy memory hit. It especially stinks on mobile browsers.
That's something that's fixable. It's just people who use infinite scroll don't do a good job of fixing some of the problems of causes. But that doesn't mean infinite scrolling is bad.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#48All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
Excellent response. Yet I feel compelled to ask: how much effort was invested in reaching such degree of finesse? Pagination is (usually) very easy to implement and can be done completely on the server side. Your (very magnificent) solution sounds like it would require days, if not weeks, to be implemented, and adds plenty of javascript to the server-side part. Do you think there's a "economy class" infinite scroll,…
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Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#49All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
Excellent response. Yet I feel compelled to ask: how much effort was invested in reaching such degree of finesse? Pagination is (usually) very easy to implement and can be done completely on the server side. Your (very magnificent) solution sounds like it would require days, if not weeks, to be implemented, and adds plenty of javascript to the server-side part. Do you think there's a "economy class" infinite scroll,…
It actually was (and continues to be) a lot of work. It's the very first thing we started work on for Discourse and will likely never quite "end."
However, browsing posts is the most core functionality we offer so it's worth spending so much time on.
If the argument of the original article was "it's hard to do infinite scrolling well" I would have to agree. Pagination is much easier to implement. But for some sites, say Twitter or Facebook or apps like Discourse it's worth the effort IMO.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#50All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
I think discourse handles this fantastically well!
I think discourse handles this impressively, and I thought of them for almost every point on this list. They're almost all fairly minor technical obstacles if you really want to solve them. Discourse really wanted to solve them and they did it masterfully.
But the funny thing is...I still don't like using infinitely long pages, even in discourse. The scrollbar is a very capable control that works exactly in a way we are familiar with, and we're accustomed to it in ways that the little progress widget simply can't compete with. And we're not going to get accustomed to the widget in the same way unless it really is universal and behaves in a very standard way (like a scrollbar does), so until that happens, I wish people would stop insisting that a page with a goofed-up scrollbar can be just as good because, hey, magic widget!
EDIT: just to give discourse a chance to prove me wrong, as it had been a long time since I looked at their widget, I went and looked at a 1000 post thread on try.discourse.org and I'm sorry, but the experience completely sucks compared to having a real scrollbar. There's no way to tell how long the thread is at a glance (the widget just says "2" and the scrollbar indicates maybe 40% is visible), there's no way to scroll to somewhere in the middle (say, you know you're looking for something around post 200) without incredible tedium, there's no fast scrolling. Their solution is technically gorgeous, but it's just jaw-dropping to me that anyone could be so stubborn as to suggest that this is a reasonable replacement for a scrollbar for content that is of a very long but known length.