“The all-new Yahoo India homepage is fast, endless, and available anywhere.”
This is the legend that Yahoo has superimposed on its video announcing the launch of the new Yahoo India home page.
Endless. You wonder why. So far, Twitter gave you an endless page. You could keep scrolling down, and old tweets would continue to populate the page till your mind got fatigued, and stopped recording tweets.
Now, Yahoo has given you an endless page. You can continue scrolling down and new headlines will keep appearing. After some time, the headlines may become more than a day old, but Yahoo will keep showing you the headlines till you call it quits.
This is an interesting development. The question is: will news sites follow the Yahoo model? Or will they stick to their current display style where the page ends after a few scrolls.
If you point the mouse arrow on the scroll bar and then click the Page down button you will find that the Cnn.com home page ends after 4.5 scrolls; thetimes.co.uk ends after 7 scrolls; the guardian.com has ten scrolls and the washingtonpost.com page is 8 scrolls deep. Among international newspapers the London Telegraph is the deepest: it takes 12 scrolls to reach the page end.
In India, the home page of thetimesofindia.com and indianexpress.com is nine scrolls deep while the Hindustantimes.com home page ends with 8 scrolls. In contrast, in.msn.com is 4 scrolls deep, while the home pages of sify.com and rediff.com are six scrolls deep. The last three are news sites that are pure internet plays.
Interestingly, the Google search pages are only two scrolls deep. Google may throw up 200,000 matches in less than a fraction of a second but the world’s number one search engine won’t weigh down its visitors with hundreds of entries on one page.
Designers, so far, have avoided designing news pages that scroll endlessly. There are three reasons for this:
One, the web reader may miss the news report as he scrolls past headline after headline. The purpose of having an endless page is therefore lost.
Two, the web reader may decide not to scroll endlessly. Instead, he may move to another site. In such cases, stories that come up after the tenth or the 12th scroll may be lost.
Three, the web reader may find it very difficult to locate a news report whose headline he liked, but decided that he would return to it later.
Hoa Loranger in an article titled “Infinite Scrolling is not for every website” has hit the nail on the head. The writer notes: “With infinitely long pages, people may feel paralyzed by the sheer volume of content or the number of choices and not click anything.”
One hopes the same does not happen to the redesigned Yahoo Home page. However, the chances of the redesign backfiring cannot be ruled out.
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