The infernal cousin of infinite scroll is “left or right swipe to navigate between articles,” which usually resets your scroll position when you swipe back. It makes scrolling impossible on a phone if you are holding it in any imprecisely aligned way (such as one-handed scrolling with a cup of coffee in hand). Luckily this has mostly died out, but the NYT iOS app still does this.
And, of course, the sites that implement navigation like this are quite bloated so one false swipe leads to a deluge of ads there and a deluge of ads back to your original place. The whole process taking 15 seconds and drains a tiny bit of the life force from your ever dwindling data plan, like a technological vampire.
It’s especially bad in mobile apps: not only clicking (and you don’t have separate scrolling wheel, you scroll by dragging the same clickable elements), but locking and unlocking screen, switching between apps clears UI state, causing scroll position and loaded data to be lost.
What frightens is that everyone agrees with these patterns, despite big companies having the best UX designers and so much talks about mobile UX everywhere. It feels like political choice: you must have short attention span and indifference to content, you just scroll, scroll, scroll. It’s like mix of TV and slot machine.
I’m fairly sure infinite scrolling exists for the sole purpose of keeping users on the website for longer as there is no defined end of the page they just keep on scrolling.
Yeah, I think that’s why Reddit just made the jump. A common pattern that I followed was to check the front page as a short break. Well, now there is no such thing as a front page. It’s all the front page.
I definitely prefer pagination as most infinite scrolls are poorly implemented. However, infinite scroll with good back button support is not so hard to achieve. Pagination is also not a silver bullet either if you want to go back and forth in the result set itself.
I often enjoy accidentally clicking or touching something and then having to start all over when I press the back button.
The infernal cousin of infinite scroll is “left or right swipe to navigate between articles,” which usually resets your scroll position when you swipe back. It makes scrolling impossible on a phone if you are holding it in any imprecisely aligned way (such as one-handed scrolling with a cup of coffee in hand). Luckily this has mostly died out, but the NYT iOS app still does this.
And, of course, the sites that implement navigation like this are quite bloated so one false swipe leads to a deluge of ads there and a deluge of ads back to your original place. The whole process taking 15 seconds and drains a tiny bit of the life force from your ever dwindling data plan, like a technological vampire.
I’m not bitter.
Often followed by trying to get back ‘down’ with ctrl+f, which of course never yields any result.
It’s especially bad in mobile apps: not only clicking (and you don’t have separate scrolling wheel, you scroll by dragging the same clickable elements), but locking and unlocking screen, switching between apps clears UI state, causing scroll position and loaded data to be lost.
What frightens is that everyone agrees with these patterns, despite big companies having the best UX designers and so much talks about mobile UX everywhere. It feels like political choice: you must have short attention span and indifference to content, you just scroll, scroll, scroll. It’s like mix of TV and slot machine.
Even weirder is having infinite scroll on a website which contains a footer. It happens a lot more often than one might think.
Right, that’s a very bizarre experience! Usually ending with view-source: or browser devtools :D
I’m fairly sure infinite scrolling exists for the sole purpose of keeping users on the website for longer as there is no defined end of the page they just keep on scrolling.
Yeah, I think that’s why Reddit just made the jump. A common pattern that I followed was to check the front page as a short break. Well, now there is no such thing as a front page. It’s all the front page.
TL;DR: Use infinite scrolls only if you really have to and remember that with it users won’t be able to jump to a specific point of the scroll area.
Saved you all the fluff.
Article was a little verbose but I did find out about cursor scrolling which is interesting.
Take a look at https://use-the-index-luke.com/no-offset
A few times in my life, I’ve encountered a website with infinite scrolling that had a link I needed to get to in its footer. Truly awful.
This is one of those blessed articles of which really the title is all you need.
One effective use I’ve seen for infinite scroll is exemplified here: http://microaggressions.com
There is no footer, but there is a kind of “statusbar” at the bottom. The sidebar covers most of the uses of a typical footer.
Moreover, in this example, the “loading more” and scrolling serves as a subtle reminder that there is an endless supply of these things occurring.
I definitely prefer pagination as most infinite scrolls are poorly implemented. However, infinite scroll with good back button support is not so hard to achieve. Pagination is also not a silver bullet either if you want to go back and forth in the result set itself.
Or websites that send you back to the start page when you scroll down too far (news sites mostly)