> The amount of stuff that users are buying should be pretty much the _only_ metric you care about.
Generally yes, we would trade an increase purchases for anything else. The test was a negative effect because we forced people to stop using search, which was the feature we were experimenting with. Making buying less efficient, even if people want to buy so much that they eventually succeed, isn't a great result.
> And they are probably not using search as much because browsing is much nicer with infinite scroll.
No for two reasons. First, browse pages didn't have infinite scroll back when this test was done. And second, the point is that people seeing infinite scroll purchased less from search as compared to the control. This was a controlled A/B test.
As gfodor says, yes the back button did return you to your place (or it did, once we ironed out all of the problems with it in early incarnations).
Given that I've never yet used an infinite scroll implementation that had reliably-working 'back' button behavior, I'm skeptical of the claim that yours worked. I'd put some money on the hypothesis that it worked under ideal conditions, or worked in testing, but failed an irritating fraction of the time in actual real-world usage.
EDIT: In fact, even if by some miracle it didn't, it probably still triggered a twitch of stress and irritation in users who assumed it would.
Generally yes, we would trade an increase purchases for anything else. The test was a negative effect because we forced people to stop using search, which was the feature we were experimenting with. Making buying less efficient, even if people want to buy so much that they eventually succeed, isn't a great result.
> And they are probably not using search as much because browsing is much nicer with infinite scroll.
No for two reasons. First, browse pages didn't have infinite scroll back when this test was done. And second, the point is that people seeing infinite scroll purchased less from search as compared to the control. This was a controlled A/B test.
As gfodor says, yes the back button did return you to your place (or it did, once we ironed out all of the problems with it in early incarnations).