Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> For an archive, I think this is a rather bad interface. The technical implementation seems very un-archivey and more suited to a "dumb user" discovery interface built upon an existing well-presented archive. :(

I think this hits the nail on the head. I don't think the new interface is bad per se, it's just optimized for a different goal than the one of most current visitors of archive.org. It would probably work best as a page dedicated to "dumb user discovery" - which might very well be an user-base worth pursuing.

This is one of those cases where creating user personas and trying to come up with different interfaces optimised for each of them would probably be the best approach.

View on HN

I wholeheartedly agree. Interfaces like that can be nice for initial browsing but I am a user who knows what she wants and I want efficiency and lots of metadata.

How does the lazy-load infinite scrolling stop you from getting to what you want? [I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm asking how]

It might not stop you scrolling there, but:

Linking to page x of result set y so you can send it to a colleague...

Or even say I've scrolled dozens of pages down, then navigate to a link, when I use my browsers back button I'm not back at the top of a list with no way to easily get back to where I was.

Both of these problems can be designed around from a UX perspective:

1) As a user is scrolling, you can use PushState to update the URL to provide actual linkable pages. It does make re-clicking that link in the future odd though because that page's results are now at the top of the screen so scrolling up doesn't really make sense, but it at least provides the ability to deep link.

2) Sites like Pinterest solve this by opening an item's details page on click in an overlay above the infinite grid. That way when you close it (or click back in your browser) the modal just gets dismissed and you're right where you left off in the infinite scroll.

"designed around" - great way to put a positive spin on "solving the problems that you created".

Sorry, but I strongly believe infinite scrolling creates more problems than it solves - and I'm not entirely sure it solves much of a problem in the first place; the "consume, consume, consume" mentality that it's oriented towards is great for things like news agencies trying to push as many stories as it can to its readers, but this is an archive of content to be browsed in a more... thoughtful manner.

>I strongly believe infinite scrolling creates more problems than it solves //

It sure does when it's used inappropriately. But can you imagine Pinterest, say, without it?

Sure it sacrifices findability or reproducibility of a view in exchange for discoverability and presentation of new content but that sacrifice works - and IMO it can work for an archive.

Provided items of content can be found, can be tagged by users (bookmarks anyone?) then if you're targetting the presentation of continuously updated content sources infinite scroll is fine IMO.

Do you have a problem with HN because one can't link to a specific view of a list of stories? Or with Google because SERPs change? Or with your favourite blog because the front-page updates with each new post?

HN, Google SERP or blog frontpages are not archives.

1) I have nothing to do with Archive.org, I'm just speaking from a UX designer's perspective. "Designing around" constraints is something everyone involved in a site build does, from backend engineers to designers to front guys to DBAs. You're presented with a set of constraints, and you come up with solutions that fit those constraints. Nothing evil.

2) There's nothing inherently wrong with "consume, consume, consume". I don't think anyone in the world would argue that Pinterest is evil or bad. It's a site for consuming en masse, plain and simple, and an infinite scroll enhances the experience. Clicking "next" 50 times would significantly ruin the user experience on that (and similar) sites.

If you need to advance exactly 50 pages, the worst thing there is from a usability perspective is to press PageDown 50 times, instead of clicking 5 times with progressive pagination or inputing the number in other traditional designs.

pinterest, facebook or twitter are whole-content streams, that's why they benefit from infinite scroll.

All very true, but if you're serious about looking at every item that results from some search (because you're researching, not merely browsing), then you will use the advanced search interface to get a CSV file (or JSON, XML, HTML, or RSS, according to preference) which you can then work with entirely locally. You'll be able then to keep track of everything you do with every item in that list.

It also makes it hard to skip further down the page. It's an issue I keep running into with Google+ communities: there's something that I know was from early in the timeline's history, but I don't remember the exact dates. But the only way to access it is to scroll slowly through the entire archive. (Google+ has the additional problems of an ineffective search that can only be sorted by "best result" or "most recent".)

The overarching plan, as I expect it, will be to have a number of ways to interact with the system. So there'll be this Pinterest-like visual browsing, more "lists" oriented, and maybe other versions, like research-oriented and so on. For now, there's visual and lists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com