I am sure you have seen old Pre-Material Design YouTube homepage layout where they had the menubar and essential details in the footer. And you have to rely on low speed internet connection, to access the footer.
YouTube's recent design has changed this. However there are lot of websites out there who make use of the bad UI design with infinite scrolling to create distracting experience.
Here's why I hate infinite scroll.
- I can't find your menubar if it's under scroll.
- I can't find your contact details under page that has endless images like pinterest.
- I can't find way to navigate between the different pages apart from infinite scroll.
- I can't find map or business details under scroll.
- I don't know when the infinite scroll will end.
Here are few things I think people who implement infinite scrolling should keep in mind.
- Don't keep menubars in the bottom footer.
- Avoid keeping essential website details under infinite scrolling.
- Offer manual triggers for infinite scrolling with buttons.
- Don't put map or media element under infinite scrolling.
Think like an ordinary web user who spends less time on the internet. And then design your website interface.
As a front end developer, I find it really annoying that people who design websites don't keep user experience in mind.
What's your experience with Infinite scrolling and other fancy web design trends?
Latest comments (33)
There are a million articles about this, and none of them address data tables in enterprise applications.
Agreed. Experience is everything.
Thing I hate most in infinite scrolling is that there are usually no means to save a position in an infinitely scrolling list to come back to it later. On an archive page of a typical 2000s web forum if I for whatever reason need to examine every thread, I can usually sort threads from oldest to newest and then and at any point I can bookmark my current position.
It's neat, and I used it many times, infinite scrolling won't let me do anything like that.
My greatest problem with infinite scroll is that it breaks URLs. When you have pagination, elements shift around as content gets added, but you can still send someone a link or save a page, and when you open it the next day, you may need to advance a page to get to the content you wanted, but with infinite scrolling you completely lose that hability and instead have to scroll to the desired position each and every time you load a page.
I really think infinite scrolling should be either an easy to opt out feature, or even an opt-in feature for some types of page.
I generally don't like it too. But it works for twitter.
I like when I can see how many pages are there and that I can jump to any page or to the last one.
You cannot appreciate true ugliness of infinite scroll and bastardisation of web pages until you visit MUO e.g. makeuseof.com/tag/set-up-bluehost-... is a typical long form article scroll to the end of page, and then it loads another long form article without asking you. If you want to save web page as an MHTML archive file - nope MUO broke it. I find pages slow, memory hogs, and screws up my browser history track with pseudo links when you scroll. MUO articles are some of the best around but they ruined their web site. I wonder how page crawlers handle this.
I always appreciate webpages that have a "Load more" button, so that you can explicitly opt-in to the infinite scroll, as well as some way to jump back to the top.
Facebook 🤢
Yes, yes, and yes. Thanks for writing the post I've been wanting to.
btw, even dev.to home page has a footer under an infinite scroll... Ahem, @ben
Yes, but we have all the same info on the sidebar and linked in the main nav. 🙃
i'm still baffled that some Designers don't realize that you can't put stuff in the footer when you have infinite scrolling, yet they do. and a lot of times they put important things there that you can't reach any other way.
fortunately i know how to use the developer tools in my browser. but what are do "normal" people supposed to do?
Why not have a sticky footer where the infinite scroll passes under?
Tons of brooken sites with that design already. It just doesn't work.