Some article websites (I’m looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a “Continue Reading” button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective–I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?
I definitely scroll for web pages, but my ebook reader apps all give the option to do scrolling and I can’t stand anything but pages for a book, so I get it.
(I do do most of my reading on eInk, so obviously scrolling wouldn’t work there. But I don’t do it exclusively. I read some on my phone and iPad as well and scrolling books feels awful.)
Regardless of user preference, on the web it’s a fool’s errand to try to force your content into a page-by-page format. Designing a paged content presentation that’s guaranteed to work on every device with every screen size is so close to impossible that it’s not worth bothering. And that’s before you take into account whether or not the user prefers to view in landscape or portrait, what aspect ratio their screen has, what zoom level their browser is set to, or even how their browser implements zoom and content rescaling. So 9 times out of 10, you’ll wind up with your content being broken into pages that the user still has to scroll around in to see all of anyway. Or where everything will be illegibly microscopic. Or both! Especially if they turn up on a mobile device – which is something like 92% of all web users these days. Every time you fail you will annoy the shit out of your user base, and you will fail more often than you succeed.
No, the sole driving factor behind sites breaking articles into “pages” is so they can load more ads on each page change.
(This does not apply to non-website mediums, obviously. IDGAF how you digest your e-books, manga, or whatever.)
There we go, a strong opinion.