For me it would depend on how the page is set up, or at least meant to be set up.

By that I mean, are people supposed to be able to get to the footer? Are there any links in it or something for the users to see?

I see many sites that have footer links such as contact us, about us, their privacy policies and other things, but, the moment you get to that footer section, more content items load above it, pushing the footer down. This means the footer is pretty pointless unless you get to the last content item which can take quite a while.

So, I don’t know if there is an actual best practice that will fit every site. I would say it depends on the type of site and the goal.

If the goal is to keep showing users more content to try and keep them in the site longer then yes, infinite scroll could be a great way to do this, just make sure there is no actual footer otherwise people who are actually trying to get to the footer and click a link will have a pretty bad time.

In terms of a blog site, as per your question, I don’t think I have seen blogs that have infinite scroll, the places I see it in are usually social media and news sites.

This doesn’t necessarily mean its a bad idea though, if it fits what you are trying to do and your goals, then its worth at least testing it.

Infinite scrolling had become a trend at some point in time however from the usability perspective pagination has always been much better. On a page with infinite scrolling the user is forced to see the extra content on the page even though he/she might not be really interested in the content.

We had once a scenario where we wanted to see the footer on a page with Infinite scrolling and were unable to do so as every time we scrolled down to see the footer extra content was adding up on the page. This page had over 30 pages of data to be scrolled down to see the footer.

On the other hand, pagination is a clear indication to the user that there are other pages too and if they really want to visit it they can choose to click and go there unlike Infinite scrolling where they are forced to see the extra content.

Having said that let me also add that there are places where infinite scrolling might be desirable. If you notice Pinterest, it has infinite scrolling to it and that's a good user experience there because everybody expects to see more content when they scroll down.

So I would say that though not everywhere an Infinite scrolling is preferred you have to take a call based on the type of content you are showing to the user and the nature of the website. Also please try to avoid infinite scrolling on mobile devices. Hope this helps.

I saw infinite scroll implemented for the first time on Aza Raskin's blog: Aza on Design a number of years ago. I looked around the web and was able to trace infinite scroll to its origins:

No More More Pages?

Infinite scroll was developed by Aza Raskin and presumably the rest of the folks at Humanized[1] in 2006 as per the above article. The article where the implementation is presented can be found via the internet archive at Reading, Humanized . Thus the original implementation was done for the Humanized Reader app on Friday the 28th of April, 2006.

Aza has given talks on infinite scroll, or infinite history as he calls it, at ixda 2008 and Google in 2009. He talks about Humanized reader at 22:00 mins into the following talk confirming the above source:

-- First 20 mins of the video are not directly related to infinite scroll --

At 23:30 he says that this idea is very old and he just reimplemented it with new technology. He also mentions that after they implemented it for Humanized Reader he then talked to the folks at Google Blogger and the NYTimes to see if they were up for it. According to other information on the web the above talk was when Google got the idea to use this for search results.

Aza was recruited to Mozilla labs later on.

[1] Humanized > About Us

From UX perspective, a disadvantage of infinite scroll is the annoying misses to click on page footer links ..hence a "view more" button is preferable to get a scrolled view instead of paginated. That said, what would still be missing is an insight into how much more can be viewed - which pagination addresses. So IMO, if we can bring that insight in the scroll view like.. "View 10/<n> more" .. where <n> could be a number or something pretty like "hundreds more". Another point that needs to be considered is how heavy a browser will get if you bring in infinite scroll instead of pagination, esp since in your case, you may have images for every item.

The basic problem behind both of them is that what user actually wants, also use it on Desktop Websites with caution. Read the reasons below

Infinite scrolling is great when user is looking for a product to add to his cart on an e-commerce mobile App because on a Mobile Device clicking next pages after 4 products doesn’t seem logical but when he switches to Desktop and Website, he might be looking for Help and customer support links at the bottom of the website then Infinite Scrolling will frustrate your user.

It happened with me once, I was trying to click on the Help and Customer Support Link in the footer of a website but whenever I scrolled, more content appeared as they were using Infinite Scrolling. So it really made me angry that why can’t I even reach the link in the footer.

So I advise that use them wisely, see if you are using it, then all the necessary links user can tap are in the header

It's a bad experience.

Most of the time, dashboards are meant to give you accurate and contextual information. Most likely relevant data. You will use this data to take informed decisions and change the path of your course, depending on how the numbers play. You can build up a lot of complexity through data visualization, and the effort is usually the opposite to throw things at the screen on a large scrollable canvas.

You can use infinite scrolling for certain pieces of information that can be 'exploratory', say, comments or 'likes', ranked search results, ranked card-style consumables on catalogs, and so on.

I can't think of an scenario where an infinite scrolling dashboard would be useful.

The word ‘infinite’ gives you your answer right there. Anything with an infinite scroll is going to (in theory) support having infinite information in memory at any given point.

As pointed out by Diego below, sometimes infinite scrolling is useful for navigation purposes, and is the same performance on the server side. But lets do an experiment. Go to Quora or Facebook, and start scrolling down.

Keep going.

Keeeep scrolling.

Don’t stop now you’re almost there.

Keep going

And going

And going

Do you feel like the Energizer Bunny yet?

Eventually, you’re going to get to the point where your page isn’t scrolling as fast, and that your computer starts to experience reduced performance as the information builds up in memory. All of that information on the screen is stored somewhere, and it’s all stored in memory, and as it fills up you’ll start to notice performance decreases.

Granted, those performances issues may take a while to come - for text-heavy sites, like Quora, there really isn’t THAT much data in terms of size. You’ll really start to notice it on sites like Facebook that utilize a lot of images, videos, etc.

Now if you look at pagination…. well all of a sudden the ‘infinite’ number of posts becomes very finite. While you may have the same number of records, they are only being stored in memory in a couple of chunks at a time.

So in the end, performance from the client-side will be reduced more often with an infinite scrolling page.

Q: “What are some ways to solve the 'infinite scrolling' problem in design?”

There are really two ‘infinite scrolling’ problems, but I suspect the class only taught you about the technical one before asking this question.

The technical one is easily solved by experienced programmers. Only scroll the metadata and use lazy resolution of contents during scrolling. Another tip is to treat all of the future scroll as lazy. Another tip is to remove all the content when it’s some large distance behind the current scroll point. Metadata is usually very lightweight, so you can carry a lot of it in current memory sizes.

The UI problem is that people get lost in infinite scroll and often want to navigate within the scroll, and if they do navigate, they can get lost. This is a harder problem to solve, and few scrolling apps even attempt to solve it. There are many ways to solve this, including scroll maps, software lenses, and landmark mapping, among others.

It is seldom worthwhile to solve the infinite scroll technical problem, since it is usually better to solve the UI problem by artificially terminating the infinite scroll, long before the technical problem is needed.

I like infinite scroll, it's very easy and not overwhelming, but it sometimes comes at a cost when you scroll a bit more you will feel that the page is a little laggy, like Facebook on PC, also another downside if you want to get a piece of information you will have to scroll again (you might not be lucky to get it if you are using Facebook for example as posts change regularly when you refresh), but I guess in most cases it's just fine.

On the other hand, pagination provides easy way to access specific page directly, let's say you want piece of information that's available on page 5, you will get it directly whether through the pagination itself or type the page number in the URL, but it's really annoying to reach the end of the page and realize that you have to click to get the next page.

I’m going to try answering this in as short of a format as possible:

Unless your eCommerce solution has millions of constantly updating (like news or tweet cards) products it does not make sense to use infinite scrolling. In fact, you’d only see infinite scroll with practically immeasurable amount of data entries (think social media platforms of any sort).

The biggest of the cons for eCommerce therefore are:

Lack of clarity in user journey: pagination would provide with definite breadcrumb: amount of pages, jump to specific page, first-to-last page jump etc.

Every other con would be either technical (loading times, asynchronous loading problems, errors etc.) or a derivative of the above.

Short answer: stick to good olde pagination.

In my opinion, it hurts a website as not everyone likes infinite scroll. I have an list of websites I refuse to visit due to endless scrolling. If I wanted to read all the articles, I would individually read them. I like the ability to advance to the top and bottom of individual articles. When a site uses endless scrolling, I cannot do this. Instead of advancing to the top or bottom of an individual article, it advances to the top and bottom of all the articles. It also uses up all my resources. To me, it hurts a website as I will avoid such a website. Unfortunately, many news websites use this technique so I am limited on the news websites that I visit.

What is infinite scrolling?

Finite scroll

The most common form of scrolling is finite scroll, A finite scroll window knows how much content there is can show the user which part they are looking at. My Mac does this by showing a grey bar on the right while I am scrolling this page and I can quickly understand whether I am at the top or lower down and how much more page there is.

Infinite scroll

This is very similar except that the control does not load all the data; just enough to display and start scrolling. The control can load the next chunk when the user starts moving in that direction. This is a great way of giving the user access to unlimited sets of data without having to preload it or even calculate the size/length that can be shown.

Scroll bars are less useful in these cases; after all the thumb can’t keep going down. A scrubbing tool pattern, where the thumb resets to a centre position after each move might be more useful.

Occasionally the network/back end won’t keep up with the users’ demand for content so there is usually a pattern in place to indicate that more is on its way.

Examples: Facebook, Twitter feeds, Slippy-map interfaces such as Google maps (when you are at the usual zoomed in level—zoom right out and it’s a finite vertical scroll with looped horizontal).

Looped scroll

In some cases a UI might call for wraparound when scrolling. If the user is faced with a scroll of digits 0–9 and is on 9 who may scroll up to quickly get to 2 (9, 0, 1, 2) or slowly down (9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2)?

When clicking through (broadcast) TV channels do you loop back to the beginning if you try to keep going past the last one?

In these cases you can show a scroll bar for position and allow for wraparound. However, users tend to get really lost and confused when this pattern is tested unless there is a clear indication that they have ‘gone round the horn’. Distracted users may scroll through a set of items two or three times before they get a sense of deja vu and then realize their mistake (not a happy state for them to be in).

There are many trends that take hold in website design, UI design, etc. that are not necessarily the best practices. In the old days it was having "About" be the first navigation button or tab (you still see that a lot). Then is was all-Flash sites. Now it's having a big slider take up most of the space about the fold. The latest seems to be the "infinite scrolling" that you point out rather than adding pages.

For myself, I don't like having additional content added as I scroll down. I don't like the delay waiting for it to load, and I don't like not being able to reach the page footer. There is a sense of incompleteness. I think having a finite amount of content per page and additional pages is a much more user-friendly and usable interface. And it makes it easier to go back and find something you saw previously then proceed again.

Sure, infinite scrolling is "cool" the first time you see it, but that doesn't mean it is the best solution. Unfortunately, many web designers succumb to coolness rather than what works best.

One big issue I have is that you pretty much lose the ability to have a meaningful footer. Sometimes, you get there and you can only glance at it for a moment before they disappear off the screen as new content loads.

If you have a slow site, it can be a disaster. The whole point of infinite scrolling is that users don’t have to wait around for more content to load. If a site struggles to load the next set of entries, what’s really the point of having the feature?

Finally, and most frustratingly, is when they lose your place. Sometimes you click on a link to an article presented four pages down in an infinite stream. You expect to be returned to the same place in the list when you click the back button. If you’re returned to the top of the list and forced to scroll all the way back down to my previous position, you may just give up.

Failing to retain the user’s scroll position breaks one of the fundamental expectations of the web.

Luckily, these are all issues that are easily solvable for site owners who use infinite scroll.

I originally answered this question with the wrong answer. (I didn't read the question closely and realized I answered this question with the answer I intended for this other question: What is the suggested behavior when you click on the back button from the resulting page of an infinitely scrolling page?)

Here's the answer I should've written:

The goal is to design to the users' expectations. Years of web usage have conditioned users to expect the back button to return the user to the page they visited before the page they are currently on.

Most users don't realize a page is infiinitely scrolling, since the behavior is practically indistinguishable from a very long page. Their expectation is unlikely to be different from a very long page.

Therefore, I'd think that the desired behavior would be to return to the previous page at the point where they clicked on the link that led them to the current page. Any other behavior would unlikely meet their expectations an add to confusion.

- o - o - o -

Here's the answer I originally crafted, albeit for the wrong question:

The goal is to design to the users' expectations. When returning to a page that wasn't infinitely scrolling, the usual behavior is to return the user to the same point they left. Usually, the page redraws itself the way it was when the user clicked away, so the link is in the same position as it was.

Returning to an infinite scroll page would ideally do the same thing. If the user had scrolled down 1000 items and clicked on a link 2/3rds down the screen, pressing the back button would ideally return the user to the page, 1000 items down with their recently clicked link 2/3rds down the screen.

My understanding is that retaining this state in a browser-independent implementation is difficult. There's some URL/Redirect trickery you could do, in essence creating a interstitial page in the browser history that retains the click-through state, but that causes other problems (like a second back button wouldn't act as expected).

The real question is why are users desiring to hit the back button? This would imply a pogosticking behavior that's likely undesirable. (Pogosticking is when the user jumps up and down through the hierarchy of the site, looking for their desired content. Most of the time, this produces substandard behavioral results. Users don't find what they are looking for and are unsatisfied with the experience.)

Is there a way to design the page so there isn't any need for hitting the back button? For example, could you provide a set of likely-next-choices if the content page doesn't completely match what the user was seeking? That's outside the scope of this question, but is worth thinking about.

The simple answer to the posed question is the likely expected behavior of the back button is to return to the previous page at the same location and configuration as when the user left. Making that happen in an infinite scroll design is likely to be difficult.

If I could pinpoint one reason for this pattern, I will bet on 'graceful degradation'.

In short, 'infinite' scrolling is not infinite all the time and as a designer, it is good to have something in case your fancy modern design decision fails - e.g. a footer that will always work maybe.

For infinite scrolling to work, it requires a rather fast internet connection. Slower internet connection like what I normally experience in places like Jakarta (and maybe Singapore at times) will break the scrolling in no time - making the presence of footer a very comforting psychological assurance ;p

Also from technical perspective, it is slower for the system for querying 'older items' (say for old Facebook items) that has not been properly cached. The implication of this is that you will see an increasingly sluggish infinite scroll that do no good for user as well as server.

As far as the research goes, it has been seen that some of the developers like the scrolling and some think it is awful. There are subtleties to the use of ‘infinite scrolling’, as far as mobile devices are concerned. Infinite scroll is designed in a way to boost user engagement and increase the duration of time that users spend on your website. If a majority of your users visit your website with no particular goal in mind, infinite scrolling will continue to roll out relevant content in a way that is efficient, digestible and interruption-free.

Pagination, on the other hand, works better for getting users to their desired content as soon as possible. The negative aspect of pagination is that it makes freeform exploration more time-consuming, as users will need to keep clicking on “next” and wait for new pages to load.