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Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

geeks.bizzabo.com

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Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#51

Post by hoilogoi »

I drag the scrollbar and use pageup/down keys as much as I use the mousewheel.

I don't enjoy getting near the bottom of the page and suddenly being warped several screens ahead, then having to go back and figure out where I was. Find a way to prevent this if you're just loading comments to an article.

I find the scrollbar less disorienting because it has a high resolution than most mousewheels, its feedback loop is tighter, and I can jump both short and long distances; that is, there's no tradeoff between speed and continuousness.

I switch to pageup/pagedown/home/end on pages with infinite scroll because I can be guaranteed I won't miss any content and it's just less tiresome that using a mousewheel IMO.

A really stellar example of these sorts of bad user interaction is the Google Art Project if anyone cares.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#52

Post by Dolimiter »

EvilTrout wrote: post #26

All 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…

Your response is excellent.

But something is missing here, an awareness of when infinite scrolling is good vs bad. Infinite scrolling is good when the information is ephemeral, and changing all the time. Dating profiles, twitter stream, live updates.

But infinite scrolling is bad when the content is fixed. Like a forum. There is a cognitive clue when paging through a forum, how far you have read, where you are.

All your answers are technical based. But they don't answer the UI problem that scrolling through the discourse forums gives people a cognitive headache.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#53

Post by [deleted] »

EvilTrout wrote: post #26

All 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#54

Post by Dolimiter »

hamburglar wrote: post #50
iamstef wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree completely. For long threads, Discourse is a usability disaster. phpBB is awful software, but everyone in the world can click on page 20 and know where they are. Jumping 2/3rds into a long topic using Discourse is essentially impossible for the average user.

But I love Discourse for at least trying something new and different - thats how progress is made. But some of their UI/stack decisions seem to have been made with no thought for normal people/web admins.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#55

Post by Dolimiter »

EvilTrout wrote: post #45
charonn0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forum…

Chapters (and page numbers) give people a cognitive clue as to where they are, when reading fixed content. Try removing the chapters and page numbers from a book, and most people will complain.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#56

Post by [deleted] »

otikik wrote: post #46
EvilTrout wrote: post #26

All 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,…

[deleted]

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#57

Post by regularfry »

wil421 wrote: post #32

Without 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…

> 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 displayed.

Pop quiz: according to convention, while using your scrollbar to skim the results that are displayed, what position do you move the scrollbar to (or avoid moving it to) in order to trigger (or avoid triggering) loading the next chunk of content? Hint: it's not the bottom.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#58

Post by regularfry »

EvilTrout wrote: post #26

All 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…

Infinite scrolling breaks what was a universal UI convention, and an interaction mode which has worked everywhere for well over 30 years, for a downright nebulous gain. You've made my browser's scrollbar widget dramatically less useful. Even on sites where I now know to expect it, I still end up unexpectedly jumping around the page while I'm trying to scroll through and read the content because the scroll bar I'm trained to use (30 years of training, remember) gets displaced out from under my mouse pointer when the next chunk of content loads.

You've replaced something which required no thought with something that requires conscious effort. Not only that, but I now have to learn how every site that implements infinite scrolling does it, because the conventions I expect for page length and page position don't hold any more. Given your response above, the very best you can hope to say is that compared to a paginated interface, you've only broken it a little bit. That's a very long way away from being worth the trade-off.

Infinite scrolling is gratuitous over-engineering, and as far as I'm concerned, any site which uses it is just broken.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#59

Post by EvilTrout »

Dolimiter wrote: post #54
hamburglar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree completely. For long threads, Discourse is a usability disaster. phpBB is awful software, but everyone in the world can click on page 20 and know where they are. Jumping 2/3rds into a long topic using Discourse is essentially impossible for the average user. But I love Discourse for at least trying something new and different - thats how progress is made. But some of their UI/stack decisions seem to have been m…

Question: Why do you need to jump to page 20?

In a long topic, what value does it give you?

We have found that the vast majority of users either link to a single post or scroll downwards. For mega topics, we have a summarize option that shows the "best of."

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#60

Post by jbeja »

otikik wrote: post #46
EvilTrout wrote: post #26

All 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,…

Good question, but you have to such fanboy when you ask?
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