January 15, 2007


Anti-Scrolling?

Over at Airbag, Greg Storey laments the bizzare:

Since when did it become evil-chaotic to design a website taller than the browser window thereby forcing a user to scroll-down? More and more I’m seeing feedback, reactions, and responses to designers work in which that particular problem is being called out (For example: “it’s good but you really ought to make it so that the user doesn’t have to scroll”).

To me this seems so counter-intuitive (and I don’t ‘do design’) that I wouldn’t even know how to respond to one of said people giving ‘feedback, reactions and responses.’ Fortunately, someone in the comments linked to an article that did:

There is something magical about the scroll as compared to the page. It allows content to be viewed in adjacency in time and space. Pages, on the other hand are separated by time, and making the relationship between two items on different pages is much more difficult. In a scroll, the two items are all part of the same scroll even if we can’t see the whole of each at the same time. The mind accepts the relationship of the two items better because the act of scrolling softens the transition between the two visible states, and scrolling really is easier than clicking (chances are you’ll be scrolling anyway).

What do you think?

posted by Andrew Simone in design, web sites 

comments

2 Responses to “Anti-Scrolling?”

  1. Deron Bauman on January 15th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    your intuition is correct in my estimation, Andrew. to divide content into pages on the web is a waste of time and usually done simply for more ad space. I don’t think you’ll find a serious user analyst who thinks dividing content into pages on the web is a good idea. if something is really long, hot links within the page can help facilitate access, but to divide a relatively short article into separate pages, with accompanying ads per page (that inevitably require a lot of download time) is obnoxious.

  2. Sheila Ryan on January 15th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    I’m with you, Andrew. So is anyone who is not . . .

    Oh, settle down, Sheila.

    Anyway, I especially like these two brief responses to the “Prolonged” post you cite:

    Beerzie: “Scrolling is one thing, but this business of having to turn the pages of a book MUST STOP.”

    Baxter: “One of these days I’m going to be ballsy enough to put ALL the content below the fold. If people can’t be bothered to scroll, they’re probably useless to me anyway.”