[danso]

Oh boy, another discussion about infinite scroll and the way things were before JavaScript coming up...

But anyway, I spent a few minutes trying to break it on the live site, and was surprised at how graceful things worked, even with knowing what's behind it. I see that it "breaks" when you click from search, to an art piece, then to a related link...and then attempt to go back to search...but after some thought, I think that's totally reasonable. When a user goes down the rabbit hole of 2+ links, how likely is it they're going to care where they were on an infinite scroll, or any other pagination system? And of course, it's probably a minefield of browser errors if the behavior was to keep persisting the iframes and original search window.

On a related note, has Artsy done a lot of data collection in terms of how their signed-in users navigate the scroll? I figure after awhile, if I were a frequent visitor, I would quickly scroll the search and then "favorite" the things I wanted to check out, rather than visiting pieces one by one, and hoping that the "back" button would maintain my place.

(Of course, power users may opt to pop open new windows for each art piece...but that's untenable on a mobile device. Also, Etsy tried that and it in A/B testing, it apparently failed spectacularly)

[Detrus]

I care about coming back precisely where I was. That's how it works on a normal website, that's how it should work here.

And it's very wonky, on Safari OSX. Broke it immediately. Command clicked an image to open in new tab and it did not open a new tab, but loaded it in the same tab. Then going back, it hung or something and I had to refresh the page. When I refresh, it goes back to the beginning. It should go to where I was, at the very least. And yes, opening in tabs should work too.

And it doesn't update the URL to say where I am, can't bookmark my position in the browse view. I want to. If it works on a normal page, it must work in this infinite scroll. Breaks basic user expectations.

Is this new? I remember liking the Artsy site quite a bit. It's still nice and pretty but I cannot depend on that infinite scroll. It is exactly like that xkcd. I remember seeing infinite scrolling done right somewhere, goes back to place, updates URL.

[craigspaeth]

Thanks for checking this out! As you guessed it going down further than one page can cause some state headaches such as navigating into another infinite scroll view and stacking iframes inside of iframes, so I decided to cut it off after the first. I'm trying to log some caveats here: https://github.com/artsy/scroll-frame#caveats

To the data tracking question: We conducted usability tests on our fair pages (artsy.net/the-armory-show) that brought this issue to the forefront. In these tests users consistently would open artwork pages expecting not to lose their place in infinite scroll. However, we haven't dived into our data yet to discover the full range of ways in which people navigate infinite scroll lists.