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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

#71

Post by marginalia_nu »

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…

I'd note that Hacker News doesn't have this problem.

Although Reddit's design decisions are almost certainly to accomodate their much larger scale.

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

#72

Post by Wowfunhappy »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #71
spookthesunset wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd note that Hacker News doesn't have this problem. Although Reddit's design decisions are almost certainly to accomodate their much larger scale.

I've seen the problem on Hacker News. A story which was at the bottom of my page 1 is also at the top of my page 2.

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

#73

Post by spookthesunset »

nonameiguess wrote: post #5
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…

Not only this, but every time it happens I have to wonder how it is that designers have never tried to actually use the scrollbar, getting to the bottom only to have it double in length, the placekeeper jumps out from underneath your cursor, the scrollbar then detects your cursor, and bam, you just skipped half the content without meaning to and it is virtually impossible to get back to where you were. This gets even…

Not maintaining a separate site for mobile and desktop isn’t lazy. Having two separate interfaces is not at all easy and it has its own set of trade offs.

For example with two sites you now have two URLs and need to figure out which experience a browser should actually see. If I’m on a desktop and somebody sends me a mobile link, which page should I see?

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

#74

Post by Wowfunhappy »

spookthesunset wrote: post #67
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my primary issue with infinite scrolling. However, I wonder if it’s mostly a problem with today’s web browsers. Heck—maybe it’s not even browsers, but websites. I’m pretty sure a website could change the URL as you scroll, so if the page is reloaded (or bookmarked, etc) you’re brought back to where you left off. I usually dislike it when websites mess with URLs, but this seems like an excellent use case!

> you’re brought back to where you left off Which is all fun and games until the “page” is actually a mutable and constantly changing list. With a mutable list there is no concept of “where you left off”.

As alluded to in sibling comments—does pagination fix this problem?

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

#75

Post by Findecanor »

sodapopcan wrote: post #19
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #12

Infinite scrolling makes the contents of the page unlinkable, breaks searchability and caching. It always makes the experience worse for unclear benefits. What's the problem it solves? Not resending the header and the footer on changing pages? Really?

Pagination also makes things unlinkable, though. Not that I’m not necessarily defending infinite scrolling, but it’s a tough problem.

Pages are linkable if the order of the collection of items that gets paginated does not change.

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

#76

Post by xorcist »

spookthesunset wrote: post #60
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.

Gigabytes of memory yes but there is load time and render time too. And rendering a 120mb payload of items and their thumbnails before I can even view the top of the page seems… not the best user experience. I don’t think there is an easy answer here. All options have some trade offs.

That is not how browsers work. The browser will render the viewport immediately, long before the page has loaded. It will also load the visible thumbnails first, unless made impossible by complicated markup of course. Otherwise surfing the web on dialup in 1996 would have been intolerable.

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

#77

Post by sodapopcan »

Findecanor wrote: post #75
sodapopcan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pagination also makes things unlinkable, though. Not that I’m not necessarily defending infinite scrolling, but it’s a tough problem.

Pages are linkable if the order of the collection of items that gets paginated does not change.

Right, “if”.

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

#78

Post by krapp »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #71
spookthesunset wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd note that Hacker News doesn't have this problem. Although Reddit's design decisions are almost certainly to accomodate their much larger scale.

Infinite scroll isn't really useful in a low velocity environment like Hacker News, hot threads being the exception.

Hacker News being designed to display trees sorted by karma also makes it difficult, you would have to re-sort the entire page to re-rank every new subtree within the current display.

Apparently, this also makes pagination difficult, since pagination is implicitly chronological - what people want from pagination is to easily find the latest items - which karma sort doesn't allow.

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

#79

Post by Wowfunhappy »

chrisweekly wrote: post #33
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 also immediately destroys the concept of a footer. IME (building websites/apps for a living since 1998) footers are an excellent and underutilized place to put large amounts of supporting materials, expanded navigation links and related affordances. Consider the absurdity of infinite scrolling in a page with a layout containing a footer that can never be reached (perhaps briefly glimpsed before bei…

I mean, the obvious solution to this problem is to not have both footers and infinite scrolling; you have to pick one.

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

#80

Post by franze »

for a major job portal we tested infinite scrolling, the main KPI "job posting views by job seeker" went down after a honeymoon period of ~2 weeks - compared to pagination

for a shopping site, infinite scrolling on average improved item views and checkout - average over all product categories, but not all. no honeymoon effect was observed

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