Infinite Scroll: The Web's Slot Machine

Another way it's like a slot machine: the randomness of whether you'll get to scroll or not. Scrolling on Twitter is a suspenseful game where it sort of works for a while but then at some point stops responding when something times out or a script breaks. Sometimes you can coax it to get going again by scrolling up and then scrolling back to the end again (presumably getting it to re-send the AJAX request that timed out). But other times that doesn't work, and you have to do a full reload. Then re-do the tedious effort of infinite-scrolling back to where you were when it stopped working. Paginated history would make going back a few months in my Twitter feed a lot less frustrating.

What I find annoying about infinite scroll:

Sites with a footer at the bottom of the web page that populate new items so fast that as you're scrolling it's impossible to click on the footer items. Facebook, I'm talking about you.

It's strange how I love or hate infinite scroll based on the use case: when wasting time looking at funny stuff on the internet, I hate it, because it's so hard to find a clean stopping point to get back to work. But when shopping, I love it, as it makes it convenient to browse a large selection of products to try to find what I'm looking for.

Either way, it's a psychologically powerful design pattern, and it should be used with care.

There is an infinite scroll wordpress plugin. I haven't installed it yet, but I intend to over the next day - pagination of articles on a homepage seems to lack fluidity.

These are great analogies: infinite scroll as a "slot machine". The Pinterest homepage is "like opening a can of digital Pringles".

But the comparison should also raise the question: are slot machines and Pringles (and everything like them) good for people?

Some of these UX patterns are thus a High Fructose Corn Syrup of design. Shovel them into any interface to make it seem more urgent, important, and novel... but it's a false sheen that's ultimately unhealthy for the audience.

I'm not just picking on Pinterest and its ilk. The kind of 'top stories' ranking used by HN is also an 'attention sugar' offender. The dynamic-but-decaying ranking creates an often-false sense of urgency; mixing unlike stories (including a trickle of duplicates and mislabeled material) in close and semirandom proximity heightens the sense of novelty. It makes reading even stories that are trivial, redundant or quickly superceded by corrections seem more important than it really is.

Perhaps we need to categorize interface patterns by a sort of 'attentional glycemic index', and limit intake of the worst variants.