Usability of an endless/infinite scroll

Question

What are pros and cons of this technique (see Softfolio for an example). Two things I personally thought of are as follows:

• Impossible to tell someone where an item of interest is located (like, you probably won't say "324-th row, second column")
• Broken navigation when you return back to an infinitely scrolled page.

What else can you think of? And what do you personally think of this approach in general. Would you use this in you projects?

Answer 1

When results are served randomly, it's a great idea. People are asking, "How do I get back to where I was?". Well, you don't. The results are random, so when you return to page six, you won't be seeing what you did last time.

If you think about it, paging Sortfolio would be a bad idea, because it would imply to its users that the order of its listings are fixed, as many of you have made the mistake of assuming.

For those asking, "How can I return to a result I liked?", well, you click the 'Save to my favorites' link. As for, "How can I share a result with a friend?", you click on the result and grab its URL. Kinda simple really.

I'm not saying this infinity-scrolling business is the way to do it, I'm just saying that some of you guys are unfairly discrediting Sortfolio for usability problems which the site—given its random nature—really needn't concern itself with.

Answer 2

I personally find it gimicky and quite annoying. It diverges from standard navigation techniques that users are used to (such as pagination) and breaks navigating back, which is very annoying (you can't get back to a result without starting again). On top of that it doesn't conform to accessibility guidelines as it is totally reliant on JavaScript to work (which goes against the "progressive enhancement" theory of the modern web). This also has SEO implications as I doubt content "beyond the fold" would be indexed, unless it was linked to directly from elsewhere.

I can see a few limited circumstances where this might be OK, such as a very long text page, but personally I doubt I'd use it in the current form. Kind of reminds me of those Flash sites that are all style and no substance and end up annoying the user rather than enhancing their experience.

Answer 3

I think the cons are that when you hit the back button you lose your place on the page. Could be annoying especially if you are deep within a page.