I stumbled upon this small page about friction by Carl Barenbrug. I found myself vehemently disagreeing with one example listed; I don’t think Undo Send is an example of friction, as to me it actually feels like the exact opposite (“Are you sure you want to send this email?” dialog box would be friction – just like the last example Barenbrug showed).

But this paused me in my tracks:

“Intentional pagination instead of infinite scrolling is progress with awareness.”

It made me realize that the only implementation of infinite scrolling I know is basically pretending the page has already been there the whole time… if it’s done well, and if you move slow enough, and if you don’t pay attention to the scrollbar, it really feels like the page goes on and on forever.

But… it doesn’t have to be that way. You could turn off the smoke or hide some of the mirrors. You could uncouple the gesture from what follows. You could add milestones (in the traditional sense of the word) after every X results. You could make the scrollbar react differently. Instead of frictionless scroll, you could force the user to bounce off of a bottom of the page in a similar vein as pull-to-refresh forces them to bounce off of its top.

I’m curious now. Did anyone ever experiment with infinite scrolling that feels… closer to pagination?