Category: roundup

Experts say don’t do infinite scrolling, or be extremely careful in doing so. I completely agree. Infinite scrolling creates accessibility and usability problems. Below are checkpoints, issues and suggestions from a few resources.

Here’s a great list of checkpoints from the article So You Think You’ve Built a Good Infinite Scroll by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian):

1. Can the user hit “back” and return to the exact same place?
2. Is there paging for when the JavaScript breaks?
3. Does the page have a footer?
4. Can a keyboard user access all other content on the page?
5. Can you share a URL to a specific place on the page?
6. Can a user easily jump ahead a few “pages” to quickly get to content much further down the list?
7. Does the memory footprint of the page dramatically increase after just a couple new “pages?”
8. Is there a way to disable automatic infinite scrolling and lean on standard paging?
9. Have you conducted any user tests?
10. Are you satisfying a use case that has come from research or user request?
11. Do you have any analytics/tracking to measure success?

In the article Infinite Scrolling: Let’s Get To The Bottom Of This, Smashing Magazine makes some great points including the following.

Fails: temptation, optimism, exhaustion, pogo-sticking, loss of control, distracting, unreachable

• Users want immediate access to exclusive data.
• Users want to feel in control.
• Users often look for landmarks when scrolling.
• Consider conventional pagination or a hybrid solution.
• Provide interesting content without an ambiguous interface.
• Users often expect a footer.
• An infinite list is still a list.
• Effects are nice to have but not a must.

In the Simply Accessible article Automatic infinite scrolling & accessibility, Derek Featherstone (@Feather) says:

• Just don’t implement infinite scrolling.
• Replace automatic infinite scrolling with a “Load more results…” button or link that explicitly invites the user to add more. Once they do a few times, prompt them to ask if they’d like to turn auto-loading of more results on.
• No, really, just don’t implement infinite scrolling.

Further reading:

• Infinite scrolling is probably not a good idea for your website by Nomensa.
• Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website (2014) by Nielsen Norman Group.
• 7 reasons why Infinite Scrolling is probably a bad idea (2015) by Adam Silver.
• Infinite Scrolling & Role=Feed Accessibility Issues (2019) by Raghavendra Satish Peri via Deque Systems.