A Bad UI Pattern

LinkedIn's shy footer is a drop in the bucket of troubles for their dev staff. Things are so horribly broken. For instance, I have a notification that will never go away: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/cgJbc.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/cgJbc.png</a><p>Their UI is noisy, broken, difficult to navigate, and seems like it was designed entirely by MBAs who know nothing about their computers, let alone design.

Just wanted to comment that at Vimeo we had this same problem, but approached it in a slightly different way.<p>When you first scroll down on the logged in homepage (feed) you get to the footer. It is only after you click "Load more videos" that we begin infinite scrolling.<p>I think this makes it less intrusive since the user is initiating that they want to see more (rather than clicking on a link in the footer for example).<p>See: <a href="http://cl.ly/image/1d3L3H3c0P2q" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/image/1d3L3H3c0P2q</a><p>On top of that we use html5 push state to make sure that the current url is updated as you scroll up and down the page with infinite scroll.<p>I'm not saying this solution is perfect, but it has seemed to work fine for us.

This is hardly the worst UI pattern in existence, especially when you consider that even a poorly implemented autoscroll is an order of magnitude improvement over the UX experience it replaces.

I dunno, I find the iOS keyboard to be higher in my list of annoyances. While typing, there's only one possible word that can be the autocomplete e term? And I have to look up, stop typing, and hit that tiny "x" if I want to override it? (I've overridden the autocomplete for "it's" and its so many times that it's apparently given up trying to autocorrect for that)<p>And who thought that shaking the device to Undo a simple typo (which the requires you to stop convulsing so that you can press OK or Cancel) was at all natural? I've yet to meet someone who intuitively figured out that feature. I had my iPad for a year before I realized it was my accidental sudden movement while typing that was triggering the Undo.<p>In terms of total annoyance accumulated in day to day use, I'd say the iOS keyboard is by far the dumbest UI pattern

I HATE infinite scrolling, especially when some menu items are only available in the footer. Either duplicate the links up top, statically position the footer, or get rid of infinite scrolling entirely. Designers: Never ever put anything mildly useful under infinitely scrolling content.

You know, i never actually noticed that issue on Facebook. It has such a clusterfuck of an interface that that is the last thing I pay attention to when i'm on Facebook. But i very much agree with the notion that infinite scrolling is a poorly implemented feature on almost all sites which use it. It's almost like it replaced pagination and forgot about the fact that you can't go to a page anymore.

I don't understand why people building these infinite-scroll pages don't just make the footer float at the bottom of the screen. That addresses this problem and lets you keep infinite scrolling.

When I went to Facebook's HQ for a hackathon, they told me the solution they use for this problem is to smash the escape key. It works for Facebook to reach the footer.

This is pretty common, but yes, it is annoying. Try going to the "About" page on Quora while logged in without accidentally following random users or topics: <a href="http://www.quora.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/</a><p>A fixed footer could solve this issue.

I never understood why there are so many sites using infinite scroll bars. I don't find it useful to navigate. When I want to find something in the feed after a few days, I need to scroll like crazy.<p>At least, pages offered some time frame where one would now around which page to look. Maybe offering a page system using arrows would allow us to easily move from a page to another, reducing the negative aspects of the page, or giving the choice to the users whether they want infinite scrolling. Nevertheless, it is useful for very dense feed where things go crazy and a thousand pages would be added in a week.

I'm a big fan of the dropbox.com website. They have a footer full of links on the homepage, which is basically a minimalist site map that helps them avoid having a navigational header on the landing page.<p>Once you login, though, the footer basically goes away and is replaced with a small left-side, fixed "footer" that really contains non-task related links in a drop-up menu.<p>This seems like a very clean solution to the problems outlined in the article.

I noticed this on LinkedIn's website while I was interviewing with them and looking for the contact link. I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to point out such a flaw during the interview, so I never said anything. My internet connection was sufficiently fast that I couldn't ever chase down the footer so I just gave up and emailed my recruiter asking for the information I needed.

I most often encounter this when looking for an "advertise" link. If I'm looking for TOS or something I can deal with three scrolls because chances are I'm going to look for it once, but I think facebook having their facebook ads section as a part of this is extremely annoying (if i dont remember the url).

How about when the bottom is reached the footer becomes fixed with an X over to the right to close it? That way you never need to chase it and if you want to scroll without it you can just close it. Or rather than requiring a click it can become unfixed after a number of seconds?

There is one link in facebook.com footer that I need to access occasionally (developers). But not so regularly as to bookmark it. So when I do need it, I do a middle-click scroll, move the mouse to the bottom of page and try to click on that link. It works after 2-3 clicks.<p>Yes, abysmal.

Tumblr is a good example of a website that has solved this problem. In the Dashboard, they have a footer a lot like the footer #2 in the Facebook example. It also makes use of the jump to top jquery plugin that makes using infinite scroll a breeze.

<a href="http://imgur.com/" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/</a> is guilty of this

Is there any site designed from the start to autoscroll that has a footer?<p>It seems like these sites implemented autoscroll after existing for years and left the footer as a vestigial organ that no longer serves any purpose.

Bad work, whoever changed the title of this submission. Don't keep it up.

I recently came up with a solution for this problem on my site. When you scroll down a few pages, the footer appears in a fixed position.<p>See: <a href="http://fandalism.com" rel="nofollow">http://fandalism.com</a>

you are talking about bad ui pattern?<p>why no one talks about the new youtube????

Infinite scrolling in itself is considered by some to be a terrible UI pattern.<p>I understand the 'need' due to the tiny screen size of most smartphones but why oh why force it down the throat of desktop users?<p>With infinite scrolling I'm losing one important ability: I can't just check where the scrollbar is and "come back" later to that place. It's hard to explain but it's something I can do very easily. With infinite scrolling I'm screwed.<p>Couldn't this be solved by serving, right from the start, a page that has a gigantic height (e.g. 5 000 pixels tall or 10 000 pixels or any unit you find suitable) and then if you scroll down "too fast" you see that the stuff is "loading..." ?<p>This wouldn't be "infinite" but I sure wouldn't be as confused.