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Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

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Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#61

Post by harshreality »

Dolimiter wrote: post #52
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 y…

Agreed. I think the discourse developers are not considering psychology and HCI, but only the technical aspects. That the implementation of infinite scroll in Discourse gives you the same information that you get in a paginated view, does not mean that infinite scroll is at least as good.

"post x/y" tells you how far you are in the page, but only if you think about it. There's no longer any intuitive connection between the scroll bar and page position. The End key stops working intuitively, sends you to the end of currently loaded posts and then loads more posts so 1 second after pressing it you're not at the end of anything. Then there's the lag as you hit the top or bottom of currently loaded posts; even if you don't want to read any more, you get more. That's clever if you're a tabloid magazine because it entices the reader to read more, but the impression I get is it's not productive.

For maximum usability, why shouldn't the app support both infinite scroll and paginated, and let the USER choose (by url slug or GET param)? (Or by user setting if logged in)

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#62

Post by regularfry »

dillon wrote: post #28

I feel like just implementing pushState would be enough to solve almost all of these issues. Some simple design decisions could help with a few more of them. I think saying flatly to not use infinite scroll lets me know that the writer doesn't have much technical skill. Rather, stating the current issues with infinite scroll and how to fix them is a million times more useful.

What problem does infinite scroll solve? Why add the complexity of more code which needs fix upon fix to get back functionality we already had? Getting infinite scroll "right" takes a lot of work (and nobody's done so yet, to my knowledge). Knowing how to fix the issues might be useful, but being able to spot that you don't need to incur the cost at all is so much more so.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#63

Post by EvilTrout »

harshreality wrote: post #61
Dolimiter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Agreed. I think the discourse developers are not considering psychology and HCI, but only the technical aspects. That the implementation of infinite scroll in Discourse gives you the same information that you get in a paginated view, does not mean that infinite scroll is at least as good. "post x/y" tells you how far you are in the page, but only if you think about it. There's no longer any intuitive connection betwe…

> For maximum usability, why shouldn't the app support both infinite scroll and paginated, and let the USER choose (by url slug or GET param)?

I've always thought we could do this as there is no technical reason why we couldn't offer both.

But honestly we receive very few complaints about it from users of the software. It seems here on HN that infinite scrolling is not super popular, but we are not getting the same feedback from our users.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#65

Post by GrinningFool »

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…

You've addressed the technical concerns well through a solid implementation combined with some workarounds (requiring specific configuration for searchable content and tradeoffs (ie9 bookmarkable content).

But this doesn't really address the usability concerns - you've mitigated them by introducing new interaction mechanisms... but these mechanisms don't solve the problems raised, they just provide a means to work around them. These workarounds are excellent in comparison to other infinite scroll mechanisms, yet not as friction-free as not having it in the first place.

Yes, this is all my unqualified opinion of course - though these opinions are what have stopped me from adopting Discourse.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#66

Post by shurcooL »

chris_mahan wrote: post #39
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…

So you're essentially rebuilding a browser inside of a browser?

Kinda, but on a different level.

A browser displays the web, but it uses an optimization where instead of loading all of the web, it loads only the web page you're navigating to.

This approach displays a web page, but it uses an optimization where instead of loading the entire page, it loads only the visible sections you're actively looking at.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#67

Post by smacktoward »

GrinningFool wrote: post #65
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…

You've addressed the technical concerns well through a solid implementation combined with some workarounds (requiring specific configuration for searchable content and tradeoffs (ie9 bookmarkable content). But this doesn't really address the usability concerns - you've mitigated them by introducing new interaction mechanisms... but these mechanisms don't solve the problems raised, they just provide a means to work ar…

> But this doesn't really address the usability concerns - you've mitigated them by introducing new interaction mechanisms

New mechanisms that the user now has to learn, as opposed to the scroll bar, which they already know and understand. And of course, every site that does this will implement its new mechanisms slightly differently, so you've traded a universally useful and understood UI convention for a range of site-specific ones.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#68

Post by wil421 »

regularfry wrote: post #57
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'…

I dont actually know, usually I just slide back to the top of the page and slide down to where I think I need to be.

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#69

Post by Dolimiter »

EvilTrout wrote: post #59
Dolimiter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

"We have found that the vast majority of users either link to a single post or scroll downwards."

Well they don't have any choice do they :D

I think that the summary tool of discourse is fantastic. So are the membership management tools/spam tools. A generation above phpBB. Just to balance out the criticism.

But the infinite scrolling is a deal-breaker (for me).

Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website

#70

Post by a_m0d »

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…

Your site still breaks when scrolling by dragging the scroll thumb down. On a long page, dragging the scroll thumb down (the way many people actually do scroll) makes the page jump around very fast, and skip larger sections as the page goes further down.
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