Photo by Jason Permenter
I haven’t visited Slashdot’s site in quite some time; blame it on my desperate addiction to my iPhone RSS reader. So I somehow missed their rather interesting approach to pagination – in place of the typical “Previous/Next” navigation controls found on most blogs, Slashdot detects when the reader has scrolled to the bottom of the page and uses an Ajax pattern to simply append more stories to the page. No clicking required – just keep on reading. Try it out for yourself. The overall effect is something like a bottomless cup of diner coffee. Just as you’re about to run out of content, along comes Slashdot to fill up your page.
The implementation is not without problems – the Slashdot footer contains a daily quote and several navigation links. Which no longer stay in one position long enough to read/click, leading to the worst kind of link whack-a-mole. And the visual cue that new content is loading is entirely too subtle; the first time I reached the bottom of the page I was surprised and mildly annoyed by the way the browser suddenly stopped responding to my attempts to scroll. Perhaps the most interesting issue I experienced is entirely psychological. Having new, compelling posts suddenly appear (just as I thought I had finished reading the front page) has definitely resulted in more than a few oh-my-god-it’s-2 am-already moments.
I’m not sure I’d include this particular implementation of clickless pagination in one of our designs just yet. That said, I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further – particularly for long lists like search results. With better visual notification and a reconsideration of how to use a footer, I think it could be a winner. And the idea of removing yet another clickable item from a user interface is certainly a compelling reason to see how far we can take the basic concept.
This pagination was on flaker.pl – polish site, and it was quite frustrating
I couldn’t test it cause my guess is it doesn’t work (just like most of the rest of the internet) on IE6 (which i’m forced to use at office, spare me), but isn’t it the exact same feature than on Google’s Reader (when your view is toggled on “All elements” instead of “New elements”) ? If it’s the case, yeah it’s just pretty neat, and they got no footer problem there cause the content area is scrollable withing the rest of the fixed layout, and content loading is done with a visual indication + anticipated when you’re a couple items away from bottom, so that you’re not slowed down in your newsreading experience. I’d love to see such a feature implemented in about as many websites as possible to be honest.
As for the article, I giggled at the oh-my-god-its-2am-already moments. So true.
Thanks for the tip. I’m not a regular user of Google Reader, so I would have missed it without your pointer.