Scroll or not scroll? That is the question.

When I first stepped into the UX/UI world, I had no idea how many details — and genuinely hard calls — come with building a project.

One of my earliest challenges was putting together a study on the use of infinite scroll in apps and websites. While researching, I found just one relevant article in Portuguese on the subject. That left me a little disappointed — so I decided to share what I'd learned along the way with the world.

Ready?! Let's dive in!

When should we use infinite scroll?

There are basically three situations where infinite scroll is a good fit and tends to work well throughout the user's journey on a given platform.

Infinite scrolling is practically indispensable when the goal is discovery. When users aren't after anything specific, they end up browsing a large amount of content to find something relevant to them.

1. Platforms where users generate content constantly

This is probably the type of app we run into most in daily life — and the one that eats up the most of our time. After all, who hasn't lost track of the hours scrolling endlessly down the Facebook or Twitter timeline? Which brings us to the second situation.

2. Platforms that measure success by time spent

Facebook again makes the perfect example. The platform turned that engagement time into a business model, building it out with sponsored posts and a handful of other tools.

Another thing worth watching: from 2015 on, Facebook has made more and more room for audiovisual content — after all, people tend to pause their scroll more often to watch this kind of thing. More on that here.

3. Highly visual content platforms

Platforms like Pinterest have a strong visual pull, and people browsing them usually aren't looking for anything specific — they're after inspiration of all kinds. That's why a sense of location within the platform matters less, and scrolling endlessly doesn't make the experience tiring or frustrating.

Going a step further, some studies tell us people tend to process images faster and more efficiently than text. Google is a good example: it uses infinite scroll for image search but sticks with pagination for text search*.

*To learn more about pagination versus infinite scroll, read this article.

What are the pros and cons of infinite scroll?

That question runs a bit deeper and touches on more technical aspects — the lag in loading content, the loss of the user's sense of location, and the trade-off between clicking and scrolling.

So I'll save that topic for the next article, where I'll walk through each of these angles point by point.

A kiss, and until next time!

Want to know a bit more about me and what I've worked on? Visit my portfolio or follow me on Behance. And if you'd like to see some of what inspires me, feel free to follow me on Pinterest!