Why we don’t like ‘infinite scrolling’ and Google’s cure for it

Seeing the title one might think, ‘infinite scrolling is no disease to cure in the first place.’ Of course, the infinite scrolling facility has saved many an effort of you manually clicking on the ‘next’ button/link. But what is the basic intention of Internet? To provide relevant information as soon as possible. But infinite scrolling defeats the total purpose!

Why infinite scrolling is a pain?

When you click on a URL thinking that it’s relevant and get back to the original page, do you not have a tough time getting back to the point you were on the original place? Maybe you can find it if you keep scrolling down for a sea of pages, depending on the age of the link, but you do know that it’s not convenient.

What’s worse is that sometimes you may end up not finding it at all. What about the ‘find’ option in the browser? Well, if you are going to Google search something and you use the find option, it is pretty obvious that every search result will be a hit for your ‘find’ facility. Also, what if you want to find one follower on your Twitter list whose name you have forgotten but picture you remember? Now, if you have one million followers, your job becomes close to impossible. To add fuel to fire, picture-heavy websites are the new fashion. This means that the amount of data consumed by “infinite scrolling” may slow your PC to a crawl or even crash your browser.

A solution for infinite scrolling by John Mueller

So, now that we know why infinite scrolling might be a pain, we might as well get into Google’s big idea. Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller has posted a working example in the scrollsample website. Note the pages numbers change while scrolling at the Gif below.

In this design, he has used a layout that enables you to scroll for eternity, till you fingers go numb. But then, the pages are numbered. The URL and the page numbers in the bottom of the page get updated with the length of your scrolling. Suppose you see something you want to get back to later on, say page 12, you have a better chance of remembering that something was on page 12 than remember how long it took to scroll down to it. This design is going to hit the internet soon for good!