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All nice and good, but this sidesteps the real problem - having a list with say more than one hundred items to begin with. Which sane developer would force his
by danbruc 12y ago
All nice and good, but this sidesteps the real problem - having a list with say more than one hundred items to begin with. Which sane developer would force his user to deal with lists with thousands of items? And which sane user would look at more than twenty or fifty of them? When was the last time that you clicked all the way to page five of your Google search result? Page 10? 100?
- solve 12y agoPinterest? Spreadsheets? Business apps? Not applicable everywhere, but for certain applications (near-) infinite scrolling is extremely popular with the target users.
- danbruc 12y agoI don't know Pinterest but it looks like it is made for random browsing through content like scrolling through social network content. There it makes indeed sense because by the very nature of the activity you are not trying to solve a specific task. But event there I doubt that people go through thousands and thousands of items. Spreadsheets? At least I hate scrolling through them. I would rather prefer seeing the thing I am interested in at the very top instead of manually searching for it. That is of course a tough problem, designing a good spreadsheet as well as offering good tools to do this or ease navigating. The same for business application. No one likes scrolling through endless lists to find the relevant things but business applications almost universally suck at it is often your only option.
- solve 12y ago> I would rather prefer seeing the thing I am interested in at the very top You've hit on the exact point. If you've ever watched a heavy pinterest user browse pinterest or other pinterest-styled shopping sites -- they look at EVERYTHING. Just infinitely scrolling for hours after hours, skimming every single item until they hit the end of a collection. Occasionally opening items in a new background tab. Probably that's where this UI works best, for apps where the person is going to look at many thousands of items, and no ranking exists that can do a decent job, for the particular user's needs other than at a rough level. Women's fashion shopping (e.g. pinterest and shopping clones of pinterest) seem to be an ideal example of that. By the way, fashion is an interesting example of being anti-ranking. If something gets too popular, it suddenly becomes unfasionable again by the rules of fashion.
- detaro 12y agoYou certainly should offer filters or other ways of getting where the user wants to go. But scrolling is better than most alternatives to get through the raw data.
- danbruc 12y agoBesides in cases where the user does not want to solve a specific task, e.g. randomly browsing news sites, social network content or image boards, going through endless lists is never what the user wants. He is looking for some specific information and that he has to go through long lists only means that the application failed to provide means to directly answer the users's question.
- detaro 12y agoBut it should be an option if you can't be sure that the application won't fail to provide the answer a better way.
- amelius 12y agoAnd what if the user wants to find something in this almost endless list, by pressing ctrl+F?
- detaro 12y agoThen the linked solution doesn't work, since it removes not visible content from the DOM.