Ideally I'd prefer (rather than infinite scroll) progressive gzip and just flush/chunk out more data all at once. Technically not infinite but fast, simple and overall a better experience, in my opinion.
Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I haven't used Discourse, but in general I'm not sure pages are meaningful in forum software. The unit in a forum is the post, not the page. I read from post 1 to post N and the page boundary is always arbitrary. If forum software dropped the pagination but added post-ination, I'd take that as a very beneficial swap.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
I suspect all you'd have to do for the other option is disable automatically swapping out pages when the bottom or top of a page is reached. Leaving the box with up and down arrows, adding a second set of double arrows, and using that for jumping N posts forward or back, or to the beginning and end.
I think javascript in-place loading of different pages is great (avoids reloading a lot of boilerplate and dependencies). What I don't agree with is the automatic altering of page contents based on where I am on the page, absent any indication (like clicking a button) that I want to change pages.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But isn't that the point of a web browser? You're not viewing the whole of the internet at once, you're just viewing this one document. To go to other documents (down, up, sideways, within) you use hyperlinks?
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#75All 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 tra…
This sounds suspiciously similar to popular arguments against the mostly-button-free iPhone interface to me.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#76What if browsers had dedicated support for infinite scrolling? Just like you trust regular scrolling to the browser or even operating system rather than implementing it yourself in javascript.
You could solve some of these problems, like the browser being able to bookmark or get the url of a specific section, and standardizing the way it's done.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#77All 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…
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Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#78All 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 tra…
The fact that two of the largest sites Facebook and Twitter use it is good enough for me. All the young ladies I've spoken to don't seem to mind infinite scrolling either.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#79The use of infinite scrolling does have certain obstacles that have to be taken into consideration. However- when done correctly it can be utilized correctly. Making a simple system that loads content at the end of the page is not enough- if you want to include infinite scrolling on your website you also have to take in mind the memory issue (as pointed out by EvilTrout), as well as other ways to dynamically update the url for book marking.
I am personally not a huge advocate of infinite scrolling (in most cases)but if are you are a seasoned programmer, that's not to say there are practical (and safe ways) to implement it.
If you want to launch a new site, and you have limited time (or are the only programmer) it's not cost effective to spend hours and hours working out all the kinks and make sure it's cross browser reliable etc... the novelty of infinite scrolling is something you should avoid. But if you have a good need, a good team (or yourself can spend time on thinking of all the various issues with it)- there is no reason why you could not implement it successfully.
I will not be using infinite scrolling on the comment system I'm writing for my start-up, pagination is good enough. But I will probably use it for the scroll back on a chat window (no one generally bookmarks chat...)
I agree with rch- people are always resistant to change... when you have something that removes a level of control- people freak out... new challenges introduced does not mean that it's bad, it just means it's a whole new set of things to think about. Humans are pretty resourceful. I liked the full physical keyboard on an old Nokia I had- but I got used to the touch keyboard- sure the touch keyboard is different, but there are many ways to make it better, and a physical keyboard adds a lot of much bulk to the phone.
I agree with the title of the post-- there are many reasons NOT to use infinite scrolling-- especially if it's just more of a novelty. But if done correctly (for for the right kind of content) it can provide an enhanced user experience.
My advice would to be: If you want to implement infinite scrolling-- make sure A) if you want to use infinite scrolling think about the aspects you have to deal with B) know general user's computer systems-- and how much memory you want to capture, C) decide if it's worth all the time to make it work right.
"New technology and trends always have good applications- it is up to you to decide if you are implementing it simply because it's trendy, because you want to learn, or because you want to enrich the community- if it's the latter- the best way to do is by sharing what you have learned, and learn from past failures" - Gus Anderson
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#80All 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…
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