Paginate in Turbo Mode - Part 3: Which to Use

The last couple posts show two options for doing pagination normal link based and infinite scroll based. The obvious question is which should you use? The standard answer, as always, is it depends.

Link based pagination is the “normal” and is expected by most users. This also makes excellent use of web affordances, giving you proper navigation history and bookmarkable pages for free.

Infinite scroll pagination does give you a cool “shininess” factor that is not present with normal linked based pagination. However, it does have a tradeoff of losing the current page when navigating and not having linkable pages out of the box. Building in these affordances can be complicated to get right and feel as natural as the default option you get with link based pagination.

Ultimately, it will take testing with your actual users to get a conclusive answer to the question of the right type of pagination and the results can be surprising. An incredible example of this is Etsy reversing direction on infinite scroll after months of development.

This might be the biggest take away from this conversation: there are no silver bullets. It always takes experiments to (maybe) know with certainty what you should do. Always consider the cheapest, quickest way to test an idea because you are often wrong, especially when you are early in the products life and trying to figure things out.