Ugh, also I hate infinite scrolling when it crashes and makes me reload the page. Like on Facebook I would scroll down and down up to posts from months ago, then it would crash on me, or I accidentally click on some link, which brings me back all the way to the top when I try to get back on it.
"There is no reason why Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can’t algorithmically determine which, say 20 posts are important to us, and give the option to only view those."
The author postulates that infinite content scrolling in mobile apps causes "dissatisfaction" and "intellectual bloat" for the user, and concludes that developers should limit content.
An alternative explanation might focus on when and how discipline and self-restraint should be exercised, the ways in which content can be curated, or how and why one might take steps to learn about such things.
As developer we tend to think it's "never the fault of the user". We have to design around human proclivities or else we would be neurologists or something. I agree with the article that this is a problem that could be solved and should be solved.
Unfortunately I think the easiest answer is gamification, sure to create much gnashing of teeth.
This is the worst. You either have to train your hand-eye coordination to be similar to an Olympic athlete or memorize URLs that only the dev team of certain sites should have burned into their brains
The column to the right of your feed (where birthdays and events show up) also includes the same links as the footer. Click "More" to get to the Developers page, etc.
Holy fud, tell me about it. I forgot which site is it, but they put their contact/blog/about links at the end of the page...you know how that turned out.
I do agree with the author but As others pointed out the algos currently are not that good to find the top10/20 stories. And the question remains that if you limit users to 20, would they feel dissatisfied that there must be more and that they are missing out?
So is the onus on the mobile developer to solve or for the user to adjust their behavior?
I don't like infinite scrolling either because there is seemingly no end, and no "landmarks" like page numbers that you can refer to to see how far you've gone.
They do not need to be mutually exclusive. A mobile app I maintain, for instance, appends each page as you scroll, but it also displays the page number of the content you are seeing and allows you to jump to specific pages.
Exactly. Additionally, it's very easy to implement a single-page-app-esque page button that simply hides one page to make room for another, then allows you to return to that page without loading any more data. Considering how rediculously easy that would be, I'd personally build it in as an option. I do realize though that it's trendy these days to simply omit all options and preferences in favor of keeping it simple.
Content limited digests are actually very popular. http://sidebar.io/2014/1/4 is one example but there are many many. It would be interesting to see how competitive they would be against the big mobile apps but at the very least it's an existing, confirmed, niche.
I think there are some UX issues with infinite scroll, and probably some cognitive benefit to giving users a predictable end to use of a product, but I don't think many people ever completed a newspaper every day. To me, a daily copy of the Times is just as infinite as my Twitter feed.
I disagree. While nobody may read every single article in a paper, we can comfortably scan all of it and decide which ones are worth reading. That is what the author is referring to, not the act of literally reading everything in your infinite TL...which is what you allude to by saying "I don't think many people ever completed a newspaper every day."
I'll be honest, I've never been a newspaper guy, but do people really go through them front to back or just scan the front page and jump to the section (sports, movie show times, etc.) they're specifically interested in?
I imagine it's like any large new source of entertainment/knowledge. At first, you'll not quite know what is interesting and worthwhile and what isn't, and will use guides to help you find what to read, and your forays into exploring further will meet with mixed success, as you waste time on things that in retrospect weren't worth it. As you become more accustomed to to the resource, you'll eventually be able to get a good idea of whether you'll like something from the section, headline, and if it gets that far, lead. At this point, since you might be scanning the whole document before you are done, jumping to sections because of main page leads isn't worth it, you'll get there eventually anyway.
For me and my wife (before our son was born, of course!) we usually read about 50% of the daily newspaper (Publico) and just about 100% of the weekly one (Expresso).
We usually would take the newspaper to the beach or a cafe, spend a few hours there just reading the paper (trading sections every so often) and chatting a bit about what we were reading. It was as nice ritual.
There are other issues with infinite scrolling (such as not being able to re-find your place, etc), however dissatisfaction is not one I experience. Maybe it's because I don't usually finish things for the sake of finishing. I'm more inclined to keep reading something until I get bored or want to do something else. I usually don't make it to the bottom of the front page of Hacker News or all the way through about 3/4 of news articles.
What the OP is saying is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. have turned into soap operas.
Nothing wrong with a "never ending story" and there's a considerable clientele for that in older media too. The LoTR trilogies also have that similar feeling for me - I'm left with a bit of a craving after watching just one.
What is, perhaps, new is the immediacy of the never-endingness. One phone-screenful is all you get at a time.
Well, it's not going to end. Right? I think the answer is we just have to know when to shut it off. Infinite scroll is a gift because we are going to have to rely on ourselves to know when to stop. Which could be a useful skill, given the oceans of information we haven't even seen yet.
"A finite list of news. An Instagram feed that can be finished. A Twitter feed that ends."
Isn't this confusing source and outcome? Even if your app (or website) adds an 'end' point, it would only be artificial. The news never ends. Instagram and Twitter never sleep. If you can't be your own gatekeeper (eg, by following a very small number of users on Twitter) then I doubt an artificial 'end' point from another gatekeeper will help you. Rather, I suspect, you'll simply add more apps to your daily reading list - an infinite number of finite apps to keep the infinite consumption option available.
The author got it backwards. Infinite scrolling of HISTORY is not a problem. Twitter feeds end at the TOP, not the bottom. You scroll down endlessly because you are bored.
What I hate the most is when I'm using a scrollbar and the infinite scroll adds more content to the bottom of the page and suddenly the scrollbar jerks up because I'm now 30% down the page instead of 15% down the page--then it takes me a minute to find where I was before the infinite scroll event. Happens to me ALL THE TIME. F-ing annoying. A "load more" button with some kind of ---------next page--------- line to delineate the new content would be preferable. The solution is to use the "Page Down" key but that's not always intuitive.
Also when infinite scroll is used on finite data. I have to spend 5 minuets awkwardly scrolling through pages to get to the end of a data set (I'm looking at you Soundcloud).
> After spending hours scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Flipboard our mind feels tired. We feel intellectually bloated, and yet completely unsatisfied. Why? Because there is more out there. What if I’m missing out on something? What if there is some critical piece of knowledge just three flicks of my finger upwards?
The author seems to be essentially describing an addiction, and suggesting that the compulsions can be ameliorated by placing arbitrary divisions in the consumption stream. I have to admit, it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in consumption behavior between infinite scroll schemes and manual "Next Page" navigation... maybe this has already been studied?
It would probably be overkill to force this on users ("sorry, we're taking away infinite scroll because some of you couldn't control yourselves") but I can see it being potentially useful as an option in apps, available for those who find themselves in need of structure.
Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced it would solve addiction... after all, cigarettes come in discrete units, and we all know how that turned out.
From experience, I can confirm that there is a pretty massive subjective difference between scrolling through a book vs. reading it in page size chunks. When I scroll through something, especially if it is dense, I tend to be continually moving the page so that I keep the sentence I am reading in the middle of the screen. Since I often scan up and down around a point in the text to gain context and solidify the meaning this has led to less retention of knowledge when I scroll through as opposed to page through. There is probably more to it as well though, because I definitely feel that bloated feeling mentioned. What's more, I feel it even during short chapters, when the same amount of text read in paged form would not give me any trouble.
Not sure if this is replicated by others, but this may reveal something fundamental about how I interpret information in printed form.
I think you're not the only one. I feel sort of a sense of anxiety in that I have to keep scrolling while reading if I'm reading a book without discrete pages (infinite scrolling also becomes a distraction from the content). If the layout is reformatted as pages, I know when a page begins and ends and don't have that feeling any longer.
I'd never willingly implement or recommend infinite scrolling on a website or mobile app. If a client wants it, I would dissuade them at first with reasons against it, but if they insisted I would implement it reluctantly with a fallback to pagination.
Yep. I understand where the logic comes from to implement them (don't have to click to see more content), but I think it comes at a cost.
It also helps that my browser implements a "fast forward" mechanism, where I can go to the next page in pagination without actually clicking a link. Just have to do a mouse gesture or click the arrow buttons on the mouse. If it were something more commonly used (unlikely to happen sadly) it would make browsing paginated content so much easier.
I tend to keep the line I'm reading at the top of the page. It's annoying if I want to reread something because I missed comprehension, but it makes me faster than needing to figure out where the next line begins while performing a visual carriage return and line feed.
Personally, I love infinite scrolling when I'm consuming content. The problem I face is when it is online content and I've followed a link. This isn't a problem for websites I view in a computer, because I usually just open a new tab and when I close it, I'm right back where I left off. If the site or application stopped after only 20 items, perhaps it was that 21st item I would have really been interested in reading.
For the past several years I've mostly switched to devices like my phone and tablets. Applications don't often feature the same approach and can't as easily return to the view I was looking at. This really limits the usefulness of infinite scrolling. If the application unloaded in the background, when I return to it, the view has reset itself at the top of the list. If I'm a hundred "pages" into the stream, I need to start over with new content that has arrived since I started reading, scroll for a few minutes until I start to recognize content that was close to where I left off, and then actually find where I went off on a tangent.
One solution to fix this problem would be a user enabled filter that hides content that I've scrolled past and only shows "fresh" content. Pagination usually solves this problem for you by having a view that includes where you are in the list. Of course that is invalidated when the whole stream is reset, but if only 10 new items have been added, it wouldn't take that long to resume where I left off.
Finally, sites that weight the ranking, like Reddit or Hacker News, cause both systems to foul up. Since the content resorts it is practically impossible to determine "where you left off." Implementing a mechanism to hide headlines for posts I've already scrolled past, would go a long way to resolving this last problem. In a best case scenario, I'd be more productive. In a worst case scenario, I'd be no better off than I am today, but it is difficult to think of situations where this design wouldn't be beneficial to the end user.
It won't help everyone overcome their addiction, but some people just need a tiny bit of friction to stop reading. The brief moment where you need to click "Next" instead of scrolling can be enough for you to realize you've had enough. I especially like HN's design, where not only is there pagination but the "next" link doesn't take you to the next page it only gives you a page that says "link expired". if you really, really want to keep procrastinate you need to refresh.
Why adapt our apps and tools to fit our old mental functioning where information was scarce, instead of evolving to the reality where there is an excess of available information?
> You reach the end of the feed, and a loading animation appears. More news loads. More pictures appear. You scroll again. The loading animation appears. More content loads. You continue scrolling
Then your mobile browser starts to lag and fucking crashes because it exhausted memory. Not to mention breaking the back button and the footer-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow issue. This thing has to die.
btw, Medium breaks text selection on mobile safari :/
Before infinite scrolling, there was pagination, which also does not stop the user from digesting an entire database of content. Some infinity scrolling even requires a click; so, on those sites, it's the same amount of clicks to see more content as it is/was with pagination. I dont see infinite-scrolling being the cause of the problem.
I would suggest sites without filtering is the problem.
To get content that is a fixed length and consumable without overindulging, there needs to be a fixed amount of content that 1 person can digest. Otherwise, you just have this database/collection of content that 1 person cant quite possibly read in one sitting... regardless of if there is infinity scrolling, pagination, or some other way to navigate.
Newspapers, in a way, curate what they are going to display each day. It's like a filter in a way. All the content is filtered to show what can fit in X amount of pages.
Websites with this problem, if they want to solve the problem, need better filtering. That might not be the only solution, but i feel like it's a major contender in helping combat the problem of trying to figure out what to consume amongst limitless content consumption.
I disagree with this premise, that we necessarily need that "end" state in content consumption. As many things in the real world have an end state as (effectively) don't. I can finish a game of Risk, but I will never finish building relationships with my friends. I can finish a pile of tacos, but I will never finish seeking an understanding of my existence. I can finish re-watching all Star Trek series, but I cannot finish learning about the opinions and ideas of others.
Some activities just go on forever. We learn that certain activities have an end and others don't. The ones that don't we give attention to in a manner proportionate to their importance. In representing content streams as infinite, publishers are simply mimicking the interminable reality of that activity. Future generations will never have learned that there's a daily endpoint to what you can know about your friend's lives, current events, etc. What a silly proposition!
I (wildly) speculate the feeling that an end state is needed springs from weakness/inability in moderating one's impulses. The end state then is really just a crutch to force one to stop some obsessive activity.
Yeah, this was more or less my reaction to this article too. Much before infinite scrolling in apps, there were libraries so overwhelming in sheer volume of content that lead Borges to conceive the universe in the form of "The Library of Babel".
Simply putting a stop to scrolling will not end the feeling of unsatisfaction, it will not end the fear of missing out. Infinite scrolling is the consequence, not the cause of our dissatisfaction.
Infinite scrolling (in a desktop browser) was why I stopped using Prismatic. The endlessness makes reading the news an uncomfortable, subtly stressful experience.
There's an expectation that curated content should be a high-quality subset of the whole internet, and providing an endless stream of content undermines that expectation.
76 comments
[ 212 ms ] story [ 1597 ms ] threadWhat could possibly go wrong?
The results are not good.
An alternative explanation might focus on when and how discipline and self-restraint should be exercised, the ways in which content can be curated, or how and why one might take steps to learn about such things.
Unfortunately I think the easiest answer is gamification, sure to create much gnashing of teeth.
So is the onus on the mobile developer to solve or for the user to adjust their behavior?
We usually would take the newspaper to the beach or a cafe, spend a few hours there just reading the paper (trading sections every so often) and chatting a bit about what we were reading. It was as nice ritual.
Nothing wrong with a "never ending story" and there's a considerable clientele for that in older media too. The LoTR trilogies also have that similar feeling for me - I'm left with a bit of a craving after watching just one.
What is, perhaps, new is the immediacy of the never-endingness. One phone-screenful is all you get at a time.
Isn't this confusing source and outcome? Even if your app (or website) adds an 'end' point, it would only be artificial. The news never ends. Instagram and Twitter never sleep. If you can't be your own gatekeeper (eg, by following a very small number of users on Twitter) then I doubt an artificial 'end' point from another gatekeeper will help you. Rather, I suspect, you'll simply add more apps to your daily reading list - an infinite number of finite apps to keep the infinite consumption option available.
With pagination this is literally 1 click!
The author seems to be essentially describing an addiction, and suggesting that the compulsions can be ameliorated by placing arbitrary divisions in the consumption stream. I have to admit, it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in consumption behavior between infinite scroll schemes and manual "Next Page" navigation... maybe this has already been studied?
It would probably be overkill to force this on users ("sorry, we're taking away infinite scroll because some of you couldn't control yourselves") but I can see it being potentially useful as an option in apps, available for those who find themselves in need of structure.
Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced it would solve addiction... after all, cigarettes come in discrete units, and we all know how that turned out.
Not sure if this is replicated by others, but this may reveal something fundamental about how I interpret information in printed form.
I'd never willingly implement or recommend infinite scrolling on a website or mobile app. If a client wants it, I would dissuade them at first with reasons against it, but if they insisted I would implement it reluctantly with a fallback to pagination.
It also helps that my browser implements a "fast forward" mechanism, where I can go to the next page in pagination without actually clicking a link. Just have to do a mouse gesture or click the arrow buttons on the mouse. If it were something more commonly used (unlikely to happen sadly) it would make browsing paginated content so much easier.
Personally, I love infinite scrolling when I'm consuming content. The problem I face is when it is online content and I've followed a link. This isn't a problem for websites I view in a computer, because I usually just open a new tab and when I close it, I'm right back where I left off. If the site or application stopped after only 20 items, perhaps it was that 21st item I would have really been interested in reading.
For the past several years I've mostly switched to devices like my phone and tablets. Applications don't often feature the same approach and can't as easily return to the view I was looking at. This really limits the usefulness of infinite scrolling. If the application unloaded in the background, when I return to it, the view has reset itself at the top of the list. If I'm a hundred "pages" into the stream, I need to start over with new content that has arrived since I started reading, scroll for a few minutes until I start to recognize content that was close to where I left off, and then actually find where I went off on a tangent.
One solution to fix this problem would be a user enabled filter that hides content that I've scrolled past and only shows "fresh" content. Pagination usually solves this problem for you by having a view that includes where you are in the list. Of course that is invalidated when the whole stream is reset, but if only 10 new items have been added, it wouldn't take that long to resume where I left off.
Finally, sites that weight the ranking, like Reddit or Hacker News, cause both systems to foul up. Since the content resorts it is practically impossible to determine "where you left off." Implementing a mechanism to hide headlines for posts I've already scrolled past, would go a long way to resolving this last problem. In a best case scenario, I'd be more productive. In a worst case scenario, I'd be no better off than I am today, but it is difficult to think of situations where this design wouldn't be beneficial to the end user.
Then your mobile browser starts to lag and fucking crashes because it exhausted memory. Not to mention breaking the back button and the footer-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow issue. This thing has to die.
btw, Medium breaks text selection on mobile safari :/
noun 1. nausea caused by endless web content, esp. by Facebook, Flickr, Mobile Apps, News Feeds
2. headache caused by intellectual bloat on consumption of too much content
3. compulsive behavior caused by intense boredom and brain freeze
I would suggest sites without filtering is the problem.
To get content that is a fixed length and consumable without overindulging, there needs to be a fixed amount of content that 1 person can digest. Otherwise, you just have this database/collection of content that 1 person cant quite possibly read in one sitting... regardless of if there is infinity scrolling, pagination, or some other way to navigate.
Newspapers, in a way, curate what they are going to display each day. It's like a filter in a way. All the content is filtered to show what can fit in X amount of pages.
Websites with this problem, if they want to solve the problem, need better filtering. That might not be the only solution, but i feel like it's a major contender in helping combat the problem of trying to figure out what to consume amongst limitless content consumption.
Some activities just go on forever. We learn that certain activities have an end and others don't. The ones that don't we give attention to in a manner proportionate to their importance. In representing content streams as infinite, publishers are simply mimicking the interminable reality of that activity. Future generations will never have learned that there's a daily endpoint to what you can know about your friend's lives, current events, etc. What a silly proposition!
I (wildly) speculate the feeling that an end state is needed springs from weakness/inability in moderating one's impulses. The end state then is really just a crutch to force one to stop some obsessive activity.
[Edit: removed disparagement of Star Trek DS9.]
Simply putting a stop to scrolling will not end the feeling of unsatisfaction, it will not end the fear of missing out. Infinite scrolling is the consequence, not the cause of our dissatisfaction.
There's an expectation that curated content should be a high-quality subset of the whole internet, and providing an endless stream of content undermines that expectation.