Infinite scrolling and assumptions

You must have heard of infinite scroll (http://pinterest.com/ , Google is a good example. See how there is no pagination). I always thought pagination was stupid when you could do something as cool as in infinite scroll.

Looks like Etsy did an A/B testing on infinite scroll.. So how it works is they roll out infinite scroll to a section of the users and stick to the old pagination for the rest of the users. And then they collect all kinds of relevant data like clicks, purchases etc of each user group and compare statistics to see if there is any significant difference in usage pattern.

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

So looks like infinite scroll had a negative impact. 

What is more insightful is the bit about assumptions.. ie. Users want more results and users want faster results. Fair assumptions to make.. what you would call obvious but they didnt have any positive impact individually.. And together, they had a negative impact. If they had tested it before they might have reconsidered implementing infinite scrolling! And there is no way you could know this before without actually getting empirical data. 

So let’s be mindful of our our “obvious” assumptions and take a step back once in a while!