Usability of an endless/infinite scroll

Question

What are pros and cons of this technique (see Softfolio for an example). Two things I personally thought of are as follows:

• Impossible to tell someone where an item of interest is located (like, you probably won't say "324-th row, second column")
• Broken navigation when you return back to an infinitely scrolled page.

What else can you think of? And what do you personally think of this approach in general. Would you use this in you projects?

Answer 1

I think it is "neat" but requires more visual clues as to what is going on... and in many circumstances isn't what the user wants.

• If I want to get to "page 7 of the results" I don't want to move to the end of the page 6 times to trigger the reload of additional data. (e.g. in an alphabetical list... If I want "M"'s, don't make me wade through a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l
• Ensure there is a visual clue of more loading if you do use this (when I press CTRL+END I expect to be at the bottom)
• I often find I'm still waiting on these types of pages because the "loading" of the next set of results waits until I'm very near the bottom... thus I often get there before the data is loaded/ready/rendered
• (pro) I think this kind of thing would be good for certain scenarios... e.g. when I scroll down my Twitter list... I don't want a "more" button, just load it...
• I would prefer better "search" filtering over fancy ajax-infinite scroll results. If I can filter down to 25 results that actually match what I want, then I won't need to scroll!

Answer 2

When results are served randomly, it's a great idea. People are asking, "How do I get back to where I was?". Well, you don't. The results are random, so when you return to page six, you won't be seeing what you did last time.

If you think about it, paging Sortfolio would be a bad idea, because it would imply to its users that the order of its listings are fixed, as many of you have made the mistake of assuming.

For those asking, "How can I return to a result I liked?", well, you click the 'Save to my favorites' link. As for, "How can I share a result with a friend?", you click on the result and grab its URL. Kinda simple really.

I'm not saying this infinity-scrolling business is the way to do it, I'm just saying that some of you guys are unfairly discrediting Sortfolio for usability problems which the site—given its random nature—really needn't concern itself with.