The first time I saw saw "infinite scroll" implemented on a large scale was in a July 2006 preview when Microsoft's Phil Holden, director of Windows Live, previewed the September 2006 launch of a whole suite of Windows Live tools as Microsoft transitioned from MSN.
Windows Live Image Search was that implementation (what Ariel referred to as the new Bing image search). In relatively small sets of results infinite scroll can be tolerable and even useful. In any sizable set it is undesirable for the reasons other commenters have mentioned above. Usability issues with infinite scroll include: - the lack of affordance makes it difficult for many people to scan or assess content using the heuristics that they expect - one usually loses the long page upon reloading it - it is the visual equivalent of the "lost in hyperspace" phenomenon that most people experienced in the early days of the Web before the prevalence of good search engines -- in most cases, no context is bad. Chad mentioned the variations of infinite scroll on Facebook and Twitter. I'll be interested to see how behaviour changes as Facebook in particular shapes it along with interaction design paradigms and expectations of hundreds of millions of people. Finally, I direct you to a similar IxDA list discussion I remembered from almost 2 years ago: Continuous Scroll http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=25287 -K . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46939 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
