Agreed, the idea of asking users to customize any level of their online experience generally meets with limited usage. I'm not a fan of user customization as a general rule, even in desktop applications, unless it's for specialized use cases such as professionals rearranging their preferred tools in an application they use for work every day.
In most cases, the presence of customization options is an indication that the designers couldn't decide on an optimal solution and punted. I would caution STRONGLY against the "bottomless scroll," however. Bing.com has been using it in their image search, presumably as one way to differentiate themselves from Google. It's been a usability disaster. The page draws dynamically, making it difficult for a user to develop any spatial memory of the images they have found. As the user scrolls, they encounter a behavior they were not expecting from a scroll bar, and the ability to intuitively understand where one is in the results set is removed by the lack of location cues. Once a user leaves the page, they cannot return to their selection on the page via use of the back button. If they scrolled through several "pages" of images, they will come back to find themselves looking at different images than when they left (after waiting several seconds for the page to redraw). Microsoft has attempted to counter this by opening links in new windows, but this only leads to a proliferation of windows or tabs that the user may not easily navigate, or even want. There may be ways to improve the paging experience, but the "bottomless scroll" seems like an engineering solution that went in search of a problem. On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 12:38 AM, dlambert <[email protected]> wrote: > Or, you could go another direction altogether and eliminate paging > entirely: > > > http://blog.wekeroad.com/2009/11/27/paging-records-sucks--use-jquery-to-scroll-just-in-time > > Admittedly, this wouldn't work under all circumstances, but it's an > interesting alternative. > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47813 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
