What is Infinite Scroll?
Infinite scroll essentially deceases your page count by putting vast amounts of content into a single page. The idea is to minimise effort and distractions for the user, thus creating a better experience, but is this always the case?
Over time infinite scroll has gone from a small niche to grab people’s attention to a common trait seen in a lot of web design.
However regardless of how popular a trend may become there will always be strengths and weaknesses in their design. For social media giants like Facebook & Twitter the infinite scroll has become a natural progression, you have to consider though just because the trait has worked well for these popular sites will it work for yours?
Infinite scroll isn’t always beneficial
Successful websites will always look at the pros and cons of current trends. What’s important isn’t that you follow industry leaders, but that you are fulfilling your own site’s potential in both user experience and design. No matter how pretty your site or intriguing the content, if your UX is done poorly your visitors will plummet.
The most crucial aspect to take into consideration when looking into infinite scroll is the type of content your users will be consuming.
Most likely you will have a clear understanding of your visitors goal when they reach your website. Are you giving them the best opportunity you can to find what they are looking for? If your not sure, or maybe your site needs some slight tweaking don’t worry this article is for you. I am writing this to inform whether infinite scroll is for your website.
The Good
Low engagement websites like the social media sites mentioned are where infinite scroll is at it’s best. The reason for this is if people are stopping to look at long detailed content or watching/using a widget attached to your site, they aren’t scrolling. When scrolling through small snippets of content, but not interacting with it, that’s when infinite scrolling really shines.
Infinite scroll also caters very well to your mobile visitors market. When using a mobile phone the last thing you want is to be fiddling through pages, in fact it’s a real turn off. However when you have a site using Infinite scroll you are providing an efficient and truly responsive means to navigate masses of content and information. Users do not even have to pre-load the page as content is only accessed when you scroll down saving valuable mobile data.
The Bad
You would think that having an infinite amount of search results coming in at a fast rate could only be a good thing. However if the content requires high user engagement such as shopping, this really isn’t the case. If you are searching for a great product it can quickly seem like an impossible task when choosing from what seems like an infinite amount of choice. The truth is you’re searching for a perfect result when the most relevant result would have appeared in the first 10 items. Infinite scrolling can be used to make you feel like if you search a little more you’ll find what your looking for, but it doesn’t always work like that, leaving users frustrated.
Footers can often become impossible to use when the page has infinite scroll, just as a user may look to use a link more results are loaded and the footer bar has vanished. Links are therefore much more difficult to find and your website harder to navigate. Repeating these links elsewhere helps, but isn’t an excuse. Footers are a necessary element to your page as users will expect them and may become lost without it. Most users will not stay on a website which they cannot navigate for very long.
Bottom line
The Infinite scroll can be an incredibly versatile and useful tool in certain situations. However while the trend looks great and is very popular in 2014 that does not mean you should necessarily implement the trend yourself on your website. Think about your audience, are they searching for something very specific or is your content high engagement? Then perhaps infinite scroll isn’t for you. However if your users are looking for low engagement discovery then you could be giving your visitors a real treat.