Why do we need pull to refresh for mobile app?

Question

I'm wondering why I still see a lot of apps (including fb & instagram) that use pull to refresh feature for updating content? I mean, they have notification system that can tell itself to refresh when there's new data. I see that FB for instance it has little bubble in the news feed section that tells me i have new feeds up there and it can take me to it if i press it, but the pull to refresh functionality is still there. Why?

Answer 1

This is a great question. I'm interpreting it from the perspective of user experience.

Fast Company did an interview with Kevin Systrom a few years ago when Instagram added pull-to-refresh. He wasn't into the idea.

Systrom feels the gesture, which enables mobile users to refresh their photo feeds with a simple tug of the thumb, is a superfluous addition to his app, a relic of another smartphone era. "I don’t believe there should be refresh buttons," he says.

You're right that applications don't need to provide manual refresh capabilities. I'd say that pull-to-refresh and other user initiated actions fall under a category of interfaces that return agency to users, rather than relying on automatic processes to accomplish a task — in this case, refreshing content.

There are a few questions a user might ask if pull-to-refresh was removed from the examples you've given.

• How do I get new content?
• How often does this content refresh?

Does the user know that the content is automatically kept up-to-date? Do they trust that it's being refreshed quickly and consistently?

Nielsen Norman Group wrote a post late last year about visibility of system status, particularly that progress indicators contribute to a positive user experience by reducing uncertainty. I'd extend this research to pull-to-refresh and related interfaces. Maintaining a user's ability to manually perform an action that fetches new content covers two of Nielsen's ten usability heuristics — visibility of system status and user control and freedom.

In this light, a user who engages pull-to-refresh has a particular mindset: I want the latest data, and I want it now. Necessary or not, allowing them to manually refresh may be contributing to an improved user experience.

Answer 2

FYI: Pull to refresh was first used by Loren Brichter in the app Tweetie 2 which was acquired by Twitter later.

I think his answer to how he had implemented Pull down to refresh gesture would be an apt answer for you question

Tweetie 2 simply took this idea from Tweetie 1, that reloading was simply “loading newer”, and “loading newer” put new messages at the top of the list… and activated the action based on a finger motion that you were already doing. Why make the user stop scrolling, lift their finger, then tap a button? Why not have them continue the gesture that they are already in the process of making? When I want to see newer stuff, I scroll up. So I made scrolling itself the gesture.

The gesture is only half the battle though, you need appropriate feedback. Once the reload is activated, the scrollable area of the list actually changes to leave the feedback UI in-place (rather than bouncing offscreen). Without this part, the UI is unintuitive. And once the loading is complete, the UI makes itself disappear.

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