I tested infinite scrolling on a large site about a year ago and the results were decidedly negative in almost every significant respect according to our A/B testing. Does anybody actually have evidence that infinite scrolling is a good thing?
HN likes to pretend that infinite scrolling has no utility, but it's simply not true. For sites where you want to quickly scan a lot of content, infinite scrolling is vastly superior to static pagination. For sites where you will typically consume every item in the list carefully and want to refer back to specific points in the list, pagination is vastly superior to infinite scrolling. They both have their benefits.
It's a good feature but it is often done so horribly it becomes not liked. Rule number one: If you use infinite scrolling instead of pages, don't remove pages. Especially on pages where content is somehow ordered (shops, lists, ..).
I agree it should be done well, but I don't agree you always need pages. For instance, when I use google images, I'm usually just looking for a few specific images in a sea of pictures and I don't care too much about keeping my place in that list. I care a lot more about being able to quickly scan through a very large grid of images, though, which infinite scrolling allows me to do.
The one caveat here is, if you're going to use infinite scrolling. Don't have links on the bottom of the page!
Sites like Facebook do this, and I have no idea why.
Want to "Create a page". Well there's a link at the bottom. But if you scroll to the bottom of the page, it's going to load more content and push the link down.
I just tried it, and the page reloaded 15 times before I gave up... never did get to the link.
On the right sidebar, under "Facebook (c) 2012" should be duplicates of all of the links at the bottom of the page. For the "Create a page" link, you have to click "More".
This is clearly unintuitive, but at least it exists.
Its probably there just in case scroll detection breaks. Some browsers - specifically BlackBerry browser (v4.6 to 5.0) - support AJAX lazy loading but don't support the scroll event.
Just a data point, I find lightbox (photo sharing site, not js lib) to be so incredibly addictive that I spent 1/2 hour on it. There's no way I would have spent more than 5 mins had I have to click on each page.
The most significant loss is the ability to keep your place. Google Reader is a good example. There's no way to bookmark how far back you've read so when I reload or close the tab I usually have give up and abandon unread items.
You could mitigate this but it would be useful to see what benefits people think infinite scrolling introduces and (if there are any) see if there is a solution that gives the same benefits with fewer costs.
Maybe some hybrid 'paged' infinite scrolling where you can keep going but clear pagebreaks are displayed which are mirrored in the browser history.
I have actually recently implemented something just like this where I use a combination of infinite scroll, pagination, ___pushState, and history to maintain your page reference. It uses Ember.js, so it even updates the pagination count for you as you scroll through the table. The infinite scroll is toggleable and you can decide to just stick with the "prev/next" pagination items as well.
Unfortunately, I had to custom roll this solution. I started on a plugin but making it universally usable for a number of use-cases is a bit time consuming.
The Danish dating site dating.dk uses a hybrid format with both page numbers and infinite scrolling (if I remember correctly). It's a site with a huge member base (considering the population of the country) so it seems to work well in the real world.
Pinterest seems like the best example. I don't have any numbers but explosive growth and fanatical users seem to be good circumstantial evidence for infinite scrolling. Prismatic also uses it and personally I love it on that site.
Personally I like infinite scrolling on a website like http://pr0gramm.com (warning: contains some explicit imagery, so NSFW)
I just check it out once every 2 or 3 days for a quick laugh and eventually I stumble upon some images I've already seen, which is when I close the site.
