Aza Raskin

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The feature that changed everything was designed in an afternoon.

That fact should stop you cold. It stops me every time I return to it. Aza Raskin was twenty-two when he designed infinite scroll — a small, elegant solution to a small, elegant problem. The bottom of the webpage was a seam, a place where the user's attention snagged on the architecture of the interface. He smoothed it away. The content flowed. The seam vanished.

Two hundred thousand human lifetimes per day. That is Raskin's own estimate of what infinite scroll now consumes. The designer who removed a seam from a webpage accidentally removed the moment at which billions of people would have otherwise paused, reconsidered, and chosen what to do next.

I think about this every time