Is continuous scrolling the best way to show/load more content?
I have seen lots of sites using continuous scrolling to show/load more content, and with a conversation with my brother, we realize that the way it is implemented, is bad for the user and performance.
There are 2 problems with some sites using continuous scrolling:
As you scroll the page, more content is added to the DOM. This is bad for performance, as it will slow down the page at some point. (eg: www.facebook.com, www.soundcloud.com)
If the page is reloaded, the user can`t get to the point where he was before, he will have to start scrolling down the page until he reaches the content again. (eg: http://www.twitter.com, http://www.9gag.com).
Possible solutions for these problems could be:
As you scroll the page, the content that is not visible in the screen, get removed from the DOM. The iOS component UITableView does that, reusing the UITableView cells that are off screen, the main ideia behind the iOS approach, is to reuse the UI components that are getting off screen (justs changing their content)
As the page loads more content, it could save the page state in the URL, like Discourse do in the posts page (eg: http://meta.discourse.org/t/read-items-appear-as-unread-workflow-issue-or-bug/2976/61). So, if a keep scrooling the page (http://meta.discourse.org/), every time it loads more content, it could save the page state in the URL.
What do you think about this? Any thoughts?
Written by Giulian Drimba
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1 Response
Continuous scrolling also kind of breaks the standard search in page functionality, since the results depends on the amount of content loaded. Unloading content that is not visible only makes it worse. The webpage must provide its own search mechanism in this case (perhaps even overriding the default ctrl+f hotkey since the default behavior doesn't make much sense anymore)
