Only a year ago, I was against infinite scroll. In design meetings, I’d point out the way it breaks various aspects of the scroll bar. (You can’t tell how far through the full data-set you are; dragging the “thumb” down causes it to suddenly change place, etc.)<\/p>\n
But now, I almost expect<\/em> it when I’m scrolling through certain types of web pages. It’s slightly disorienting<\/strong> to me when I bump into the bottom of a page and have to manually click “next” or whatever.<\/p>\n What happened? In a word: New Twitter.<\/p>\n Okay, it’s not really “new” Twitter any more (it was rolled out from September through October of 2010<\/a> — less than a year ago, but those 9 months are an eternity in Internet time). But still, that roll-out was the impetus for my change in opinion. Twitter, a site I use every day, changed its UI and started doing infinite scroll. And now that interaction is a part of my daily life, and somewhere along the way, I got used to it. And now I expect<\/em> it, at least in certain cases.<\/p>\n And it’s because one site changed its interface. And because that one site is one I use many times every day.<\/p>\n Logically speaking, there’s no reason why I should expect, for example, Google’s search results or my Dreamwidth reading page or TechCrunch’s front page to behave like Twitter does. One site’s UI shouldn’t — and doesn’t — have a damn thing to do with any other site. But the things we use frequently shape our habits<\/strong>, and that includes habits of thought.<\/p>\n As a side effect of my having gotten used to Twitter’s infinite scroll, I’ve gotten far less inclined to check the position of the scroll-bar “thumb” to see how far through the page I am… except on the kinds of pages that I expect<\/em> to not have infinite scroll. For example, an article or story has a natural end, and it just makes sense for a calendar to be paginated.<\/p>\n But blogs? Or search results? Or anything that doesn’t have a natural break-point in it? There’s no reason why these things should require me to find the “load more” link. And there’s really<\/em> no reason why that link should load stuff in a whole new page. Dynamic pagination with URL parameters like “?skip=40”<\/a> was always a kind of awkward idea; it’s just that there didn’t used to be anything better. But now there is.<\/p>\n Right? I mean, that really is<\/em> the case, isn’t it? I don’t just think so because one of the sites I use every day has retrained the way I think… right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Only a year ago, I was against infinite scroll. In design meetings, I’d point out the way it breaks various aspects of the scroll bar. (You can’t tell how far through the full data-set you are; dragging the “thumb” down causes it to suddenly change place, etc.) But now, I almost expect it when I’m scrolling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,8,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}