Page Flips are Better than Infinite Scroll | Hacker News Reader

Page Flips are Better than Infinite Scroll

designdare.com

34 pointsmikewest18 comments

For media designed to be displayed in pages, my prejudice fits with the author's claim.

However, infinite scroll in Bing's image search provides a more enjoyable experience than using Google's paged image search.

The article says that page flips are better than scrolling for iPad books.

I'd say it's one of the form options (http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/) that designers for an iPad should get to choose. Do you want your book to scroll or flip, or leave that up to the reader?

For example, a book of long poems may work well to scroll through each poem, but flip between different ones. The innovative thing about a digital screen is that it de-couples length of a text from the need to flip the page.

I think the choice should be up to the reader. Especially in texts with figures, tables and illustrations, there's a better chance of being able to see an illustration and the text describing it on the same screen if scrolling is an option, whereas if the text/illustration are separated by a page break and your only option is page flips, you're SOL.

The very best in most cases would be for the designer to make the 'right' choice for the content... in other words, the best is for the user is to not have a choice but never want one in the first place. It's a joy to use something that's had that level of care put into it. Of course, when that doesn't happen, you need options.

That doesn't work when the 'right' choice depends on user preference. The designer can't make a single right choice, because there isn't one in the vast majority of cases.

I am reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's talk about tomato sauce. Some people like chunky. Some people like plain.

Even if there were a right choice, what are the chances of designers choosing it?

If side-by-side pages are allowed (they are) then this is less of a concern. But the real thing you want for texts with figures, tables, and illustrations, is the ability to split-screen. I certainly hope that feature is at least in the pipeline....

Exactly. A choice should be given.

But I agree that for the book format, page-flipping should be the default and is more reader-friendly than an endless scroll (as long as the page flipping animation is non-annoying and fast).

The very first thing I thought about after reading this article was memories of listening to Disney stories on my toy 33rpm record player. You would follow along while the beautifully voiced characters recreated the story. When you had to change, Tinkerbelle would ring her bell as a notification to flip the page. This article reminds me simultaneously of the cheesiness of that page flip bell and of the fun and enjoyment of listening and reliving my favorite stories over and over.

In this age of push notifications, continuous Twitter feeds and the like, I think it is always a welcome return home to the visceral feel of reading an engrossing book page by page.

Ever since the early days of the web, I've had problems with scrolling web pages. I'll read a page or so, press pagedown or space to go to the next segment, and read that---and my eye snaps right to the top of the window, where the next chunk of text will be. UNLESS, that is, I'm on the last piece, at which point I get totally lost because I have no idea where to find the last sentence I read. I have to re-scan from the top, searching for it.

So I knew exactly what the author was talking about when he was extolling the benefits of paged interactions!

If you use Opera, it can be configured to draw a faint grey line at the position where the bottom of the window used to be. (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Browsing -> Show Scroll Marker)

Yes, hate it when that happens.

I think a very nice aspect of reading on a touchscreen with drag-to-scroll is that this doesn't tend to happen. It makes things feel continuous and cohesive rather than chunked.

Yeah, mouse wheels and touch scrolling have pretty much eliminated that problem for me, so it's jarring whenever I have to use someone's machine without those features.

Except he also ignores so much about scrolling. He makes the assumption that scrolling can only work one way. You do, too. Your problem isn't with scrolling. It's with the way scrolling is implemented.

Even the articles diagram shows a horizontal scrolling example that would make reading easy. One page per screen. Done with that page? Scroll to the right. That's it. You could even have the scroll snap to the next logical page.

You might call that paging, but it's not. Paging in this context is simulating flipping a page.

My favorite app on the iphone, an ebook reader called Eucalyptus (http://eucalyptusapp.com/), has the best page turning model I've ever seen.

It's not a prerendered animation and turns at the same speed as you move your finger. I find the experience to be as good as a paper book and significantly better than apps with preset animations or a screen refresh.

Stanza on the iPhone turns to the next page with a single touch on the right side of the screen (and turns back a page with a touch on the left.) When I first started using Stanza, I was annoyed that it didn't scroll. But now I definitely prefer the touch-to-flip interaction.

It looks like the iPad is going to have a swipe-to-flip interaction. I'm wondering if I'll like that as much as touch-to-flip.

It does have touch to flip. Watch the video.

There may yet be some scroll-oriented in-page indicators that would offer one proposed benefit -- "never having to wonder where to continue reading" -- of page-centric presentation.

For example, a manually-positionable 'pagemark' you could use if turning away from a block of text, or automatically-added lines/shading which capture where you've scrolled to so far (with intelligent updating based on time lingering at certain positions, or reversals of scroll-direction).

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