Many popular website provide the facility of infinite scrolling. Facebook.com is the best example, it adds to the content when you scroll down on the page. In the background, the website keeps sending requests to database and populates that data on your page. Other social media websites have also adopted this idea and allow you to have a page that never ends. This kind of technique creates a better appeal to users especially to those accessing it from touchscreen devices. However, it is not always a good idea. Some reports say that it can harm or negatively influence the UX factor of your website.
Absence of pagination can leave the reader clueless about where he was. This surely creates a negative impact on the overall user experience. There are a few workarounds for this.
Experts say that endless scrolling can hurt the overall UX of your website due to some psychological reasons. User can feel lost or no control on viewing. With pagination technique user has full control over the information or pages he is accessing. There is some sort of indication on how much content is there to see. Even if the page is long, the scrollbars can give idea of the remaining content.
On a page with continuous scroll, users can have a big doubt while clicking on any information as they worry losing their current reading position. Pages with infinite scroll therefore end in having lower conversion rate. Often E-commerce websites cannot afford to have lower conversion rate so it is advised to not have pages with continuous scroll of items. It has become quite a tradition to have contact information, social website links at the footer place, but if footer does not exist then visitors will be clueless about this piece of information.
If your website is loading or pushing content on the page on a continuous basis, then user may be flooded with the options available. Scrolling page only with keyboard can be tedious in such conditions. People using screen readers could face difficulty while reading the data and users might get frustrated.
For all the above reasons, infinite scrolling may not be a working solution for many businesses. Especially on websites where people expect structured and hierarchical content, pagination is still a good choice. If you are fascinated by the continuous text feature, then you can limit it to some level and create a hybrid approach for browsing your website. You must decide about your content presentation approach in the beginning while you conceive the idea of a business website.
