The trouble with Bottom-less pages
During the past few months I have noticed that many websites and blogs are rapidly jumping on the band wagon of bottom-less pages. You keep scrolling and they keep loading more content for you to read. Let’s just consider one simple scenario to understand the depth of the problem.
Over the past 15 years of my experience working on web based applications, corporate websites, and the like what I have found is that businesses need to tell the visitors about who they are. They often even desperately need to attract talent so they wish to let visitors know if they have any job openings (most of them love to also tell how important their team is and how “the people” are the heart and soul of their company). Along with copyright information etc. Users on the other hand (especially on websites that need registration) like to know about the privacy policy and any terms of use. So here’s what happened today:
While browsing around and clicking on shared links I ended up on a website: http://www.notjustscore.com/
It’s a pretty neat website, clean UI, lots of content, some interesting user engagement ideas, but lo and behold they’ve got a bottom-less homepage. You keep scrolling and they keep feeding you with more content. For all practical purposes there is almost no top or side navigation. The sign up stays stuck to the top and also gets pushed right at you with an overlay. So, naturally I wanted to know who was it that wanted me to sign up with my “Facebook” or “Twitter” details (I trust those companies so yes I have accounts there). Also, I wanted to know what these guys would do with my personal information along with other stuff like cookies and what all I was allowed to do on the website. You probably have guessed it, I started scrolling… to find the footer! It is usually the footer that most websites as a rule of thumb tuck away such information. I kept scrolling and scrolling, content kept on loading. Boom! that’s when I realized the problem. A tough nut to crack that I am, I scrolled frantically with the mouse wheel and then took the control (scroll bar) in my hand and almost yanked it down. I barely got 2 or 3 seconds to catch a rare glimpse at the footer, which quickly disappeared again. These are the links that I could spot but could not possibly click (I think the copyright information was also there on the right hand side):
Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Careers, About Us
Bottom-line: There should be a limit to the use of Bottom-less!
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