Contrary to Dan McKinley's half-apology as quoted in the article, infinite scroll is stupid on your website.
Infinite scroll flies in the face of the way the human brain works with groups and sets, makes it virtually impossible to usefully search within the current page using the browser's search feature, etc. And the positives are? Nothing, other than novelty.
It is one of the many recent examples of webdev/designers doing something because it is possible and trendy and new rather than because it adds any value.
Paged results with a well designed indication of where you are plus good server-side categorization and server-side search to filter results is far preferable to infinite scroll in every practical situation.
Keep the infinite scroll for those purely arty non-commercial story-telling sites, if you make me try to use an infinite scroll interface to buy stuff from you I will buy nothing.
Of course your opinion may or may not be right but the point is to figure out a way to test it. The reason infinite scroll was attractive at Etsy, among other reasons, is because it is reminiscent of the experience one has at a large craft fair where you quickly scan through hundreds of items on tables looking for one that jumps out as worth zooming in on.
I don't think those experiences are at all comparable. I'm a compulsive scanner, I can usually impress people by my ability to quickly scan pages of text without really processing any of it while finding a specific word or phrase. Infinite scrolling is nothing like that experience for me. For one thing it is impossible to involve peripheral vision with any type of web page scrolling and peripheral vision is absolutely essential to that type of scanning. And moving your eyes to scan something that is fixed vs. keeping your eyes still to scan something moving are also vastly different experiences in my opinion, not really at all alike.
Sure, this is a anecdote based argument levied against the hypothesis. Its a fairly weak way to make final decisions though. Again the point was that there was intuitive reason to believe this concept may be fruitful, the problem was we devised too large of an experiment and spent too much time to get to a point to validate the core hypothesis.
To be perfectly honest opinions like yours provide guidance of what to focus on but in general this type of intuition usually turns out to only capture part of the dynamics when something is actually used by millions of people, and in many cases intuition turns out to be the polar opposite of the reality the data tells you.
It's interesting you mention your reasoning for wanting to add the functionality. I believe this falls under the "Better Than Reality: A Fundamental Internet Principle"[1]. This is such a common pitfall in the web that I feel like it needs to be reiterated over and over. That's not to say your effort wasn't worth it - you achieved your goal and that's important.
Infinite scroll flies in the face of the way the human brain works with groups and sets, makes it virtually impossible to usefully search within the current page using the browser's search feature, etc. And the positives are? Nothing, other than novelty.
It is one of the many recent examples of webdev/designers doing something because it is possible and trendy and new rather than because it adds any value.
Paged results with a well designed indication of where you are plus good server-side categorization and server-side search to filter results is far preferable to infinite scroll in every practical situation.
Keep the infinite scroll for those purely arty non-commercial story-telling sites, if you make me try to use an infinite scroll interface to buy stuff from you I will buy nothing.