Friday 28 November 2014

Week 13: Infinite Scrolling

Our blog this week focuses on the topic of Infinite Scrolling. What comes to your mind when you hear the term infinite scrolling ?


Infinite Scrolling is a web design technique that prevents the browser scroll bar from scrolling to the bottom of the page, causing the page to grow with additional content instead. Infinite Scroll is a feature that loads the next set of posts automatically when visitors approach the bottom of the home page or posts page. It’s designed to help visitors read through many posts without effort.
When you get to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a loading icon display briefly as the next seven posts load below.



Some advantages of Infinite Scrolling

Perfect for Touch

It is of utmost importance to have equally good UX on both desktop and mobile devices. And since most of the tablets and mobile phones are made with touch technology you would prefer to focus on touch optimization. The small screen size of a mobile device demands a forward-thinking technology to display the content in a way that is more convenient for the user. Making users to tap those tiny page links to get to a new bunch of content is far from being usable.

Visual Oriented

Who doesn’t like high quality beautiful images? This is probably another emerging trend on the web that is based on “a picture is worth a thousand words” principle. And the best way to deliver image-heavy content appears to be infinite scrolling. This way users won’t be distracted from their delightful experience by the need to find and click the next link. Pinterest and Flickr are great examples of how visual oriented websites benefit from infinite scrolling.

Better Content Exposure

Regardless of the type of content your website is offering you would like to get as much impressions for it as possible. In case of content pagination users won’t see what’s on the next page until they click it, while infinite scrolling puts all your content on one endlessly long page. Everything is within a “scroll’s reach”.
Fast and Easy Browsing
Infinite pages are usually faster than regular webpages. The reason is that as the user scrolls down the page, more content loads automatically in the same page eliminating the need for clicking on page links and reloading pages every time. This saves time, which is good not only from a user’s but also from SEO perspective.

More Room for Creativity
Infinite scrolling itself is a quite innovative way for displaying information, yet it also holds a huge potential for creative outbursts. In the hands of a web design virtuoso infinite scrolling can turn into something not only interesting and usable but also fun. A very popular creative extension of infinite scrolling is the parallax scroll technology that creates beautiful visual storylines through scrolling.
This is how a website with Infinite scrolling looks like:







Some disadvantages of Infinite Scrolling 


Footer Problem
This is a very big issue especially for ecommerce websites. If you have made an online purchase at least once you know exactly where all the important links are located: in the footer. Now imagine you want to visit the “Shipping information” page on an infinite scrolling webpage. Catch it if you can! It is pretty annoying when you have just a few seconds to find and click on that link until it “scrolls away”.

Disorientation
Everything there is on the web is basically recreated from the real world, right? From this point of view anything that is infinite is already unnatural and contradictory. If there is no order we won’t be able to handle the immense amount of information that flows into our lives every day. And we come across the same issue with infinite scrolling. It lacks orientation and users have difficulty finding something they have previously seen on the page. They are unable to mentally locate that item and easily come back to it afterwards. In case of paginated content at least you can relatively map the information with the help of page numbers.Moreover, that scroll bar on the left gives inaccurate information about the amount of content that is left to load and users feel cheated and annoyed when they realize there is still more to come.

Navigation Issues
One of the very basic UX principles states that users need to always know where they are in the hierarchy of a website. This is essential for website usability. In case of infinite scrolling it is very difficult if not impossible to understand where you are at a given point. Moreover, when you click on an item and then want to go back where you left, the “pogosticking” thing happens and you are brought back to the very top of the feed. Imagine how annoying that is.

No Skipping
One of the biggest advantages of paginated content is that when needed you can skip the first let’s say 100 pages and go straight to 101st, which is impossible with infinite scrolling. Users can’t even nearly imagine the amount of content there is, let alone skip a part of it.
Browser crash. No new technology works flawlessly on all browsers and infinite scrolling is not an exception. When a big amount of content is loaded the memory of a computer, especially an older one can easily crash. You don’t want such UX, do you?

Overwhelming Content
It’s always good to have lots of quality information on a website. But when there is infinite content loading every second users may feel out of control and exhausted. It’s like a pleasant road trip that has no destination and never ends. Knowing there is so much more information out there users are unable to stop until they get bored and psychologically daunted.

Hear is a clip of how infinite scrolling is implemented using word press



A very good example of such creative approach can be found below:
Link 1
Link 2

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