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Re: Advice Sought for Continuous Scrolling on Retail Websites

for

From: _mallory
Date: Jan 26, 2015 7:41AM

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 05:55:58PM -0500, Karl Groves wrote:
> Does anyone else have any ideas (besides OMG infinite scroll is the devil!)?

Needs to at least hit all of Adrian's list:
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2014/05/so-you-think-you-built-good-infinite.html

On top of that, for e-commerce, customers like to have several items
open or easily reachable once they've started going into their
compare fase. While a separate compare function can be useful (we use
it, as do many other e-commerce sites), people who don't know the
open-a-new-tab tricks (or people on mobiles or anywhere where browser
tabs are either not a thing or the UA is just single-context) have no
"tricks" to juggle several products at a time (being able to quickly
switch between products that have caught their eye but are not really
committed to otherwise).

That and the "inifinite choice" mental paradigm has been shown to
work against conversion. See the Colombia U. jars-of-jam study.
(seems the actual study itself is only a PDF that I can find...)

And of course this:
OMG infinite scroll is the devil!

The one place I can see it being okay might be a single news story
on a single site, without footers or anything on the bottom. This
because it's the only type of site I can think of where I will not
do any interaction other than scrolling... and possible highlighting
text.
Though then that too will break when you include external links or
haven't implemented a substitute for the now-broken / or CTRL-F
inbuilt browser search function.

Also, regarding landmarks for keyboard skipping... I would have plain
links going from column to column, since screen reader users aren't
the only ones needing to get the cursor around.

_mallory