Infinite scrolling is both a blessing and a curse. The feeling of being able to keep scrolling through posts and links without the need to visit a whole new page is liberating. You feel more in control of where you go next, and that feeling of control is paradoxically what leads to a loss of it.
Your Facebook feed is a great example of this. It offers up a seemingly endless supply of updates to read and browse to your heart’s content. As soon as you finish scanning a post there’s another new thing right below it for you to engage with. This is central to the business model. Facebook needs you on the site or in the app as long as possible in order to get more ads in front of you. Infinite scroll is a powerful tool for capturing audience attention and time.
This works well for Facebook because it’s a media company. Users visit it to consume and share information. It’s about enjoyable and uninterrupted entertainment.
Where this doesn’t work is with search.
When you’re looking for information the last thing you want is for it to take too long to get an answer. When you’re looking for a place to get dinner or the next show or movie to watch, it does you no good to be caught up scrolling through option after option.
Maybe you find a great place on Foursquare but right below you notice a couple other spots that might be good and you scroll down to them. It doesn’t end there because as soon as you check out those options you see a few more pop up below. Before you know it, you’ve forgotten about the first place you almost picked and you’re now debating between two other options you’ve only just discovered thirty minutes later. You may not even come to a decision.
The encouraged consumption of infinite scrolling does not mesh well with the need for fast searching.
When searching, humans often take on the mindset of ‘Maximizers’. We have an evolutionary need to collect as much information as we can. When the opportunity presents itself, we will spend staggering amounts of time researching for a particular decision. From what school to enroll in to what cut of jeans to buy, important and innocuous issues can receive the same amount of thought.
When we search there is no doubt we need information, but we also need focus. We need to be encouraged to take a moment to evaluate the information we already have and not tempted into searching further.
Adding curation with context in the form of lists offers a viable solution.
Lists are great for search. They serve as hand-picked aggregators of information. They possess inherent context which builds trust and, what’s most important, they’re limited. Lists have an ending. This is key for overcoming our ‘Maximizer’ mindset that usually activates when we’re in search mode and tries to collect more and more.
Good curation is important for a great search experience. While that curation can be done with technology or human input, it’s critical that we go beyond simply unloading as much information as possible. If you’re looking for information fast, you need context, brevity, and structure. Lists have that in spades. So the next time you search, make sure you’re being put on a direct path to an answer and not a winding road of excess ideas.
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