AJAX and the Endless Scrolling Feature of Pages
Posted on April 17, 2007, under Development, Tools and Services.
AJAX has brought a lot to us in the department of usability, and in turn people have created some really slick features in web services. One I have noticed becoming more popular lately is the endless scrolling of pages and lists, as appose to using next and back buttons to get more results. DZone just went under a site redesign and features the endless scrolling in their lists. I must say I like the feature from a usability perspective, just continue to scroll for what I am looking for. While looking into examples on how this is done, I found some downsides to this technique.
- If you count page views for statistical information or ad revenue, you will need to figure our a new way to track such efforts.
- If you are concerned about SEO you will probably have to create a site map or a backend static page for search engines to crawl and index.
- If your user does not have a scroll wheel, using this features is difficult. Not only is it tedious, but the scroll bar length just keeps on growing and never ending.
- Along side with #3 the memory that the browser is allocating on the users machine will continually increase, because the page is continually increasing. I got Firefox up to 180MB before stopping.
- If your back end that is serving up the data between the page and the data source is slow for any reason, the endless scrolling hangs and it ruins the smooth effect that it brings.
There is always a plus and a minus to these such things, and these problems are not problems to every one or every service that wants to implement the endless scrolling feature. These are just things I noticed when kicking the tires on it, and looking under the hood.
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