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Please tell me why "Load More" button is an improvement

Joppy

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Apr 13, 2006
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So yahoo mail in the past week or so changed their email page layout. Not only is it buggy, its also confusing to figure out how to do things I usually do. Fine, I'll get used to it eventually. But what really bugs me is the display style of the email list. Before, they had a certain number of email display on a page, where you can click on a number to navigate to different sections. Now instead, they have the 'load more' style. when you scroll down to the bottom of the email list, it will automatically or by clicking the 'load more' button expand the email list. I don't understand why internet sites, like google or youtube, are using the "Load more" style for displaying things instead of page styles.

With the 'load more' style, I can no longer browse my emails any more, at least it becomes very inconvenient. I have to wait till a whole part of a email list to load before I can see emails from an earlier time. With the number style, I can skip back.
What worse is for youtube, when I browse a channel's video, it will only show a certain number of videos. The only way to display the rest of the videos is to search for them, but if I am new to a channel, I wouldn't know what to search for. So that makes a whole chunk of a channel's video inaccessible. After the implementation I have been subscribing less to new channels and spending less time on youtube in general.

So can someone please tell me why "Load More" button is an improvement.:mad:
 
I also hate the "load more" method.

I like just having a full list that can scroll at speed.
 
Don't like it either. Long lists should have pagination and that's it.
The worst are those that bug when you load more, and force you to reload the page... except that if you had clicked "load more" about 5 times, you need to re-click them again instead of being able to skip ahead to page 5, because #### you is why.
 
The idea behind the "load more" button is to save HTTP requests. In the pagination style of the old web, you'd click the next page, and the entire page would be loaded from the server. This means elements that you've already downloaded, like the global javascript files, the images for the logos and menus, etc, would be loaded twice. The "load more" just makes an AJAX call which loads DATA instead of MARKUP, which then gets used to fill in only the new part of the page that needs updating. For instance, when I click on the pagination of the JREF forum, you can see that everything gets loaded again.

The question is whether or not this makes sites more usable. I'd say that for people on mobile devices, the answer is yes. Scrolling long lists are a pain on your phone, and page refreshes take a long time. This is the idea behind making sites responsive. A good site would display data in the way that makes the most sense for the device it's viewed on.

Just my two cents.
 
No, that's not the case. Pagination is not necessarily a full page load. You can just as easily page via AJAX as by loading a new web page. We have an application that does exactly this.

An infinite scroll, a.k.a. "load more" is no efficient than pagination; it's become trendy, I think, due to some web services using it. It is horrible to use if you have a fixed size list you want to search or sort.
 
grmcdorman said:
No, that's not the case. Pagination is not necessarily a full page load. You can just as easily page via AJAX as by loading a new web page. We have an application that does exactly this.

An infinite scroll, a.k.a. "load more" is no efficient than pagination; it's become trendy, I think, due to some web services using it. It is horrible to use if you have a fixed size list you want to search or sort.
Click to expand...

I'm just trying to explain the idea behind it. I make no claims that it's better or worse.
 
Unabogie said:
The idea behind the "load more" button is to save HTTP requests. In the pagination style of the old web, you'd click the next page, and the entire page would be loaded from the server. This means elements that you've already downloaded, like the global javascript files, the images for the logos and menus, etc, would be loaded twice. The "load more" just makes an AJAX call which loads DATA instead of MARKUP, which then gets used to fill in only the new part of the page that needs updating. For instance, when I click on the pagination of the JREF forum, you can see that everything gets loaded again.
Click to expand...



Even if that were the case (which it isn't, because there are several ways to get around that), it would just give the dev incentive to reduce and streamline all of that extra junk. Which would be an added bonus! On one browser I have images and scripts disabled by default, and only load them if I need to. And it is great.
 
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OnlyTellsTruths said:
Even if that were the case (which it isn't, because there are several ways to get around that), it would just give the dev incentive to reduce and streamline all of that extra junk. Which would be an added bonus! On one browser I have images and scripts disabled by default, and only load them if I need to. And it is great.
Click to expand...

This doesn't really address the technology behind what websites are doing. Single page applications that load only the data and content that changes are more efficient than websites that load the entire page again in order to refresh content. Having a button that loads this additional content as opposed to a pagination list or an "infinite scroller" are just other ways of accomplishing the same thing. An infinite scroller just watches the window scroll for a certain threshold and when it's hit, it loads in more data and updates the snippet of HTML involved.

TLDR; It's undeniably better to load less data as people browse the web, since more and more people are using mobile devices to do so. The UI choices involved are more of a question of which fad is en vogue, but the underlying reasons are sound.

P.S. And surfing the web with JavaScript turned off is soooo 2005. ;)
 
Thanks for the reply everyone. I understand more now.

I suppose what bugs me most is the lack of option. Those features might benefit others in their own usage, but for me its an opposition to the way I like to use sites. I have been decreasing my time spend on any sites that started to implement the 'load more' feature. Its detrimental for them to not allow the option for pagination. Maybe thats better for me cause I am wasting less time on the web.:)

I also noticed that for my older computer, it take longer for those sites to load. I don't know if that is related?
 
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