Pull-to-refresh is bad design.

[Ertio]

I am sure most of you are familiar with the "pull-to-refresh" touch screen gesture. You know, that thing that refreshes when you pull against the top.

 

It goes by several names, including "pull-down-to-refresh", "swipe-to-refresh", "pull-to-reload".

 

The pull-to-refresh gesture, has become a de-facto standard in mobile apps. We have accepted it without questioning how useful it actually is, and more importantly, whether it might be doing more harm than good. It's time we question it.

 

Pull-to-refresh seems like a helpful shortcut at the first glance, but there is more here than meets the eye.

 

Pull-to-refresh does more harm than good.

 

Unwantedly refreshing a page while scrolling up is one of the most frustrating parts of using a smartphone.

 

Unwanted refreshes occur when you swipe down to scroll up, then you didn't realize quick enough that you already reached the top, pull down again, and initiate an unwanted refresh.

 

That's because the pull-to-refresh gesture creates ambiguity when swiping down. The result of swiping down becomes unclear. It is no longer that swiping down does exactly the one straightforward thing of scrolling up, but it might cause a refresh.

 

The presence of the pull-to-refresh gesture forces the user to pay attention with each swipe down to avoid triggering a refresh accident. Scrolling up is necessary far more frequently than refreshing content, so most of the time, refreshing is an unwanted effect of pulling down.

 

Now, refreshing might seem like something harmless, even something positive, but that's not always true.

 

Destructive refreshes

 

Refreshing isn't always harmless. Refreshing can be destructive since it clears all input from the page.

If you were playing audio or video from a website, a refresh forces you to seek the last position again.

If you were writing a text and just wanted to scroll to the top but swipe down one time too much, say good-bye to your hard work!

Pull-to-refresh is in effect "pull-to-delete".

If you were browsing a feed, a refresh kicks you out of the current position and you lose the last seen post.

 

Google made it mandatory in mobile Chrome.

Once upon a time, someone working at Google had a thought. That thought was: "Twitter has this thing that where you pull down at the top, it refreshes. How about we implement the same thing in our web browser?"

 

And with that, the most disastrous addition to Chrome for Android was born.

 

Both tech giants Google and Apple have made pull-to-refresh mandatory in their mobile web browsers. This means it is impossible to turn it off. Google used to have the mercy to let users turn pull-to-refresh off, but in 2019, they took that option away. Chinese giant Xiaomi also made it mandatory in their browser.

 

To get rid of pull-to-refresh, all Android users can do is switching to Samsung Internet because at least Samsung has the decency to let users turn this utter nonsense off.

 

But Samsung Internet lacks a different vital feature, the ability to save pages into the download folder. Samsung saves pages in a private locked-down location where the files can only be accessed through Samsung Internet on that one phone. The data can not be backed up or moved to a new device, so if you switch devices, you can't take your saved pages with you. It's called data lock-in. But that's a topic for another day.

 

Pull-to-refresh does not save time.

Pull-to-refresh is often slower to access than a refresh button since pull-to-refresh requires that the user is viewing the top end of the page.

If someone actually wants to refresh a web page, they can use a refresh button that can be accessed in half a second from a submenu.

 

Conclusion

I would love to see blindly accepted destructive design trends die out. Pull-to-refresh is one of those trends.