Infinite Scroll’s Popularity - A Contrarian View
Building empathy for the user base which resents infinite scroll
TLDR / Core Insight - User faces fatigue with infinite scrolling and slowly starts resenting the product.
Advantage of infinite scroll
Effort the user has to take to see the content on the website is reduced and the user engages with the website for a longer duration of the time.
Background
We built a Data scientist/Machine learning engineer’s productivity tool where they would document their work and then slice and dice this data.
Why did we introduce pagination and skip the infinite scroll?
Our thought process is as below:
The infinite scrolling induces fatigue, and consequent resentment for the time wasted, in the Data Scientists scrolling the content. We needed to help the data scientist identify the right post on the board, this meant that we had to fine tune the search functionality of the board to help the user find the relevant post.
The infinite scroll lets the user passively surf the contents and improves the time spent on the site. But a product that seeks to improve the productivity of the user for any given task, the user wasting his time searching for the right post would have been a red flag. This could be same with apps such as Facebook where if the users feels they are wasting their time then they would uninstall the app.
The engineering cost to implement infinite scroll is much higher than that the amount of time taken to implement pagination.
Our solution for such scenarios
Identify per user the average number of posts users scroll till they find the right content/post for themselves. Then paginate the experience based on this. Fix the metric as reducing the number of posts the user needs to see before finding the right post and work on the search functionality to reduce this number.
What are your thoughts on this ? Is there something that we should consider other than the points raised ? Let us know in the comments below.