Your awesome app is 80% less awesome if you don’t avert the user losing their position.

Sam RuebyUncategorized Leave a Comment

Everyone hates pagination. How many items to display? 10? 20? 50? 100? I know, let’s give them the option. We’ll default to 10, so there’s 100 pages. They’ll immediately click 100 so they can just see everything without clicking more, until they get to the bottom of course in which case they’ll need to click to see the next page anyway.

“How do we solve this?” They say. “Oh I know, infinite scrolling.”

dhRKsyG

So fancy. No more pagination! THIS IS PERFECT.

No, it’s not. Well okay, I prefer this to pagination. With one exception.

If you don’t actively try to prevent me losing my position, it’s worthless.

I’m looking at you, Twitter Android app. This is how I feel every time I’m scrolling through content and all of a sudden I’m shot to the top.

Rage FU

I’m looking at you, Flipboard. Such a cool way to scroll through content. Fast, tailored exactly to me. Oops, the network connection hiccuped.

Flipboard unturnable page

I barley started and already I got the infinite-unturnable-page. The only way to even retry that I’ve found is to exit the app. Which, of course, takes you back to the top. Hope you weren’t very far down, it’s going to be a thumb workout to try to see what news you haven’t read yet.

So remember kids: friends don’t let friends write applications that easily allow you to lose your place.