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Do not combine footers and infinite scrolling
- sayrer 4y agoThis is why you'll find the "© 2022 Twitter, Inc." footer in the right column of the twitter dot com website.
- sbmthakur 4y agoAre there any use cases for infinite scrolling that do not try to engage on the app permanently?
- stoicjumbotron 4y agoI think GitHub has it too once you log in
- heydemo 4y agoFor why else did God create the stars that man's reach might always exceed his grasp.
- jessedrain 4y agoMy friend and I had a good laugh about this article. Eloquent and straight to the point.
- smitty1e 4y agoPast all of the boilerplate and digressions, Fennel sounds as though he's coming out against the use of infinite scrolling in the web page footer.
- harryvederci 4y agoThis made me laugh out loud :-D
- eyelidlessness 4y agoAll that nuance is important lest the point be misunderstood or misconstrued.
- TimPC 4y agoBut what if the footer contains the entire site navigation UI. Then surely I can do this..,,
- lobo_tuerto 4y agoDon't remember a specific instance, but I've seen this used in a couple of sites. Kind of mind numbing. Try to read the text or click on a link in the footer, and if you're lucky the request will be slow enough.
- ptk 4y agoNot exactly the same, but theverge.com has recently decided to shove about 50 Outbrain ads, across 3-4 loads, in between the end of the article and the comment section. It makes me livid every time, yet still I go back :(.
- HPsquared 4y agoThey need to make you carefully look through the ads somehow!
- vgel 4y agoI'm fairly convinced sites do this because someone there is sick of having to moderate their comment section, but doesn't have the buy-in to get rid of it entirely. So instead they stick a bunch of ads above it, hide it behind a button, etc. in hopes of annoying people into not commenting.
- tiahura 4y agoMcClatchy owned newspapers do this.
- jayd16 4y agoGotta use the ol' turn off wifi to hit the bottom trick.
- TheFreim 4y agoI've experienced sites with infinites scoll footers where the disable button is... on the footer.
- totetsu 4y agoGoogle images page is an example
- indymike 4y agoShh. Don't tell the committee that designed the footer that no one can ever see it. They'll want to go with the supermenu header instead.
- epolanski 4y agoI thought he referred to sticky footers.
- ravenstine 4y agoThat's okay. The menu items in the header will drop down on hover, making it very easy to use when the user is scrolling the page. :)
- tuxie_ 4y agoIf you are wondering what his argument is, just don't.
- zhte415 4y agoI prefer visiting the comments for a distillation of the main arguments of often long winded blog posts.
- Aeolun 4y agoYeah, I’m inclined to say his message could be conveyed with just half of all the words in the original blog post.
- iostream24 4y agoWho knows. The page is down and 90% of is never got to read the article but the title sounds appealing. Well, just position:fixed; bottom:0; your footer and make sure your scrollY - element.height or whatever has an offset to account for the footer. Pity the site is down. Can’t read the article. It could be about conniving cheese merchants and their never ending battle for umami supremacy ffs, how should I know.
- Aeolun 4y agoOriginal content of the post, minus the title, which you can read on HN, was: Just don’t. (2 words)
- quickthrower2 4y agoRemove “combine” and make it “or” I assume footer here means fixed position footer. The normal footer or “tags near end of document” is fine by me.
- tuxie_ 4y ago"Do not or footers and infinite scrolling"??
- quickthrower2 4y agoDo not: footers or infinite scrolling.
- ricardobeat 4y agoNo, this is about normal footers ("tags near end of document"). The problem is that with infinite scrolling you can never reach the end of the document, it always slips away as new content loads.
- alphabet9000 4y agomissed opportunity to put the "just don't" message inside the footer of a page with infinite scrolling
- SnowHill9902 4y agoMany e-commerce sites are guilty of this.
- amanzi 4y agoCloudflare used to do this with the DNS page. If you had a huge zone file, you'd have to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until it finally stopped loading. I can't remember exactly what is was but there was definitely an important navigation item at the end of the zone that could only be accessed after the entire zone had loaded.
- andai 4y agoUnplug ethernet?
- longrod 4y agoI wish this was made impossible by browsers. It's like making a user chase their tail; they won't ever catch it. They just keep going in circles until they explode with frustration. You can't even cancel the requests to load more data. I have come across a couple of these (I think blogs & news sites do this) and it is so annoying.
- II2II 4y agoEspecially when you are trying to reach the RSS feed link in the footer, which you are desperately trying to reach since an RSS reader will allow you to avoid infinite scroll!
- iostream24 4y agoRSS first design needs to become a thing
- eyelidlessness 4y agoIt’s possible I’m lacking imagination after ~20 years of web dev experience, but I can’t think of a way to systematically prevent this. I can hardly even think of a heuristic to detect it which wouldn’t be either overly broad or overly specific. A spec which privileged more of a page’s “chrome” as part of the browser UX would probably make that more realistic, at the expense of being a very high value attack surface. This is almost certainly better addressed by discouraging and shaming than by trying to fix it at the browser level. I agree with the clarity and brevity of the article (even if I can’t muster such brevity to save my life). And it’s very rare that this kind of UX is any more onerous to me than closing the tab/leaving the site.
- ushakov 4y agooverflow: hidden
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThat’s effectively the same behavior as a footer below an infinite scroll. It’s just more obviously stubborn about it.
- swayvil 4y agoReddit used to do that. Dunno if they still. Remember trying to scroll to the bottom to click a crucial link. Quite funny. I think it was the settings-scrollmode menu.
- itcrowd 4y agoThere are a couple of HN plug-ins that enable infinite scrolling and disregard the accessibility to the footer. Super annoying.
- DevKoala 4y agoThis drives me crazy too. You can never get to the stupid footer.
- devoutsalsa 4y agoDisable WiFi, scroll to bottom, click on footer link, enable WiFi.
- flenserboy 4y agoDo not use infinite scrolling. Much simpler, much better.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoInfinite scrolling works great for search results. I have it enabled in DuckDuckGo, and when I use Google and hit the bottom of the page, clicking the next page button feels sp cumbersome. For anything not ephemeral like search results, infinite scrolling sucks.
- chii 4y agoif you infinite scroll, you'd also need some sort of url update so that you can always copy the url, and get back to this scroll position. i hate sites that have infinite scroll, but never allow you to "save" a position in the scroll to come back to in the future.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoThat's my point: most search results are ephemeral, and Google/DuckDuckGo results certainly are.
- mgdlbp 4y agoBut the more ephemeral the content, the more one might want to save the page in a web archive, which (unfortunately) can't scroll down. Granted, there isn't really any use in archiving ephemera like search results and frontpages other than notarizing odd patterns to show your friends or blog about, so the problem really lies in the interaction of web archival with infinite scrolling in general: comments sections, for example, can only be conveniently archived in their entirety without scraping if they're paginated and nothing is unloaded by default.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoYeah, and YouTube's comment section drives me insane, because it's one giant unthreaded infinitely scrolling list. There's no way to navigate, and if you scroll back up to the video to check something, you've just lost your place and have no hope of ever finding it again. But DDG search results? I scroll until I find what I need, then I close the tab (it's rare to get past page 2, and yes DDG does actually group the results into numbered pages, with each page loading as it's scrolled into view).
- gumby 4y agoAdd the kill sticky bookmarklet to your bookmark bar.
- sbarre 4y agoI can't believe this is still a thing.. Been complaining about this for a decade now but web design is destined to reinvent the same flawed UIs over and over forever.
- cturtle 4y agoCompletely agree. Though, I do think Grumpy Website [0] uses the footer & infinite scroll combo in a way that perfectly fits the site :) [0]: https://grumpy.website/ https://grumpy.website/
- eternityforest 4y agoA simpler version of the rule would be: "Do not infinite scrolling". Seriously, infinite scrolling is disgusting. The only good use I can think of is for realtime feeds. Infinite scrolling has no repeatable reference points. It has a similar effect to a wall-o-text. It seems to go in the same category as gestural computing, an way to make computers feel "Skillful" to use, and "Organic", while throwing away efficiency, reliability, and any sense of consistency and precision. It's annoying both in terms of aesthetics and usability, to pretty much everyone, except maybe people who really hate tech.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- duxup 4y agoDepends. The only time I've used anything like infinite scrolling it was for long search results. For that customer's app / use case it actually worked. But honestly that was about it for times I've used it / felt it worked.
- homero 4y agoAmazon does this and it's horrible
- beetle 4y agoSpoilsport!
- productceo 4y agoI once shipped a new product, and was surprised to receive no negative feedback from users regarding content quality. Happens out, UX team placed the "Send Feedback" button below the infinite scroll content feed.
- duxup 4y agoMetric met! I recall a new marketing executive who touted that they had improved the youtube ads so much that NOBODY had skipped a single improved youtube ad! They made the ads all so short that you couldn't skip them.
- rk06 4y agoIsn't it a good thing? Like if the ads are 5-6 seconds. Then they are certainly in right direction. If they were trying "skiping not allowed in 60+ sec long ads", then it would be bad
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoIn the right direction for... What? Maybe for your attention span or what YOU like but maybe not for what they are actually buying ads for... Money
- klyrs 4y agoI've encountered pages like that and wondered if the ux devs did it for that express purpose... last time I saw it, I was looking for some legal info (copyright/privacy or something); a dark pattern indeed.
- lucasyvas 4y agoIt's hilarious to me that the Design/UX team is always the one making mistakes like this where I've worked. We're just sitting there saying, even from a non-code point of view, this shit makes zero sense. Ignored as usual.
- 4y ago
- parker01011001 4y ago
- duxup 4y agoWho makes these decisions really? HN tends to be more developer focused but I suspect most of these horrendous type decisions aren't made by random dev, and random dev isn't in a position to stop it. Many years ago I once worked at a place where a CRM app had "special instructions" and at one point management was so upset about people not following them 100% of the time they were considering "make them blink" so the drones wouldn't miss them ... thankfully the blink tag had been deprecated. These instructions were sometimes several paragraphs long ... and they wanted them to blink...
- cortesoft 4y agoA lot of smaller shops don’t have dedicated designers. The devs do the design work, too.
- duxup 4y agoThat's where I'm at... but of course we don't have footers of doom, because we won't. So that's kinda moot as far as all the internet "don't do this" proclamations go. I suspect the really bad stuff comes from places other than the developers.
- applejacks 4y ago
- duxup 4y agoI think there’s a big difference between unintuitive and the footer thing.
- wtallis 4y agoA lot of UIs designed by developers without going through a real design phase end up only making sense if you already have a mental model that more or less matches how the software works under the hood—the easiest UI to implement is usually one that doesn't provide any abstraction over the inner workings. So you end up with a steep learning curve, but software that is usable once you understand it. That's entirely different from a software feature whose design makes it literally impossible to use.
- jehlakj 4y agoSomething tells me we're seeing more of this partly because of graphql and its first class spec to infinite scrolling. So no - I don't think the decision came from none other than the programmer who do this. And to be quite honest, UX designers I've worked with don't really dictate this kind of stuff. Heck, some don't even know how the scrolling works in their own designs when asked about it!
- kgeist 4y agoHeh, in a feature we're about to release, infinite scrolling was indeed dictated by the programmers, as it makes the API cleaner and somewhat more scalable ("incremental loading of data with an opaque next page token" as opposed to "go to page 80 and I don't care if it takes forever/complex archirecturally to make it fast/consistent"). We could have added a "load more" button but it looks somewhat terrible on mobile.
- moneywoes 4y agoSite down
- neonate 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220604205246/https://willfennel.com/posts/2022/06/04/do-not-combine-footers-and-infinite-scrolling.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220604205246/https://willfenne...
- evnp 4y agoShould read "Don't place footers below infinite scroll." I appreciate the brevity but this fails to notice the nuance, and ends up being too reductive to be useful advice. Footers can work just fine combined with infinite scroll, eg. https://radiopaper.com/explore https://radiopaper.com/explore on desktop (disclosure, I am one of the authors). That said, paying attention to how UX/features interact is something we should always strive to do more of!
- tasuki 4y agoThat took me a while to find out. Also, I had to read the entire about page to understand Radiopaper, but I like this idea a lot!
- evnp 4y agoThanks for the feedback - we have actually discussed how the current footer UX isn't the most discoverable (not due to infinite scroll though :) We're looking for ways to communicate the concepts better - please feel free to message me at https://radiopaper.com/Evan https://radiopaper.com/Evan if you have any ideas!
- apd_ 4y agoThe site is down. In case you really want to read the entire post, here's the link to the archive[1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220604230938/https://willfennel.com/posts/2022/06/04/do-not-combine-footers-and-infinite-scrolling.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220604230938/https://willfenne...
- abdouls 4y agoI cannot seem to reach the link in the OP, however, I would say that infinite scrolling needs to have a solid UI/UX around. One of the main reason for inifinite scrolling is to have more and more content shown and try to attract the users and let them stay around (social networks for example). However, there are cases where it's not implemented correctly and clicking next becomes very awful...
- codeflo 4y agoI wish this also contained an alternative suggestion. Where else should I hide the link to the privacy statement and the button for opting out of data collection?