Websites and Scroll Bars.
Does your website have scroll bars? It might not seem like an
especially important question, but it is. In fact, when it comes
to website usability, the question of scrolling is one of the
most vital ones out there.
Tired of all those annoying scroll bars on websites, documents,
etc? Want to get a bigger screen and not pay 300 bucks? Well,
here's a simple little trick that many folks have never even
thought of: Change your screen resolution.
Do Users Like to Scroll?
One of those eternal questions of web design is whether users
are fine with scrolling, or whether they hate it. In reality,
the answer lies somewhere between the two: plenty of users don't
mind scrolling in the least, but there are plenty of users who
still just don't scroll. The very young (with low attention
spans) and the very old (with poor hand-eye co-ordination) are
the two biggest groups in this category, but it is also true of
people who are just new to the web. You should be designing your
site so that scrolling gives added value, but isn't essential
for basic usability.
The Mouse Wheel Revolution.
Since the beginnings of the web, people have become much more
receptive to scrollable pages, thanks to mouse wheels and
similar devices. These let them scroll with a quick flick,
instead of the inconvenience it used to take. As a result, your
visitors will be much more willing to scroll on your website
than they used to be, and this works to your advantage. Still,
you shouldn't rely on it completely.
Don't Eliminate it Entirely - But Pay Attention.
The answer, then, when it comes to scrolling, is to be sensitive
about it. Place everything important in a position that allows
it to be reached with no scrolling even on the smallest
monitors. Give your users the choice of whether to scroll or
click, by linking to the individual parts of the article at the
top of the page in a table of contents. In short, let the
scrollers scroll, but don't hide anything from the people who
don't want to.
Please, No Horizontal Scrolling!
Whatever you do, though, keep your scrolling vertical.
Left-to-right scrolling on the web is an absolute abomination.
Users aren't expecting it, mouse wheels can't do it, and web
browsers aren't designed for it. In short, it is a very, very
bad idea. Every so often some designer will come along and try
to make it work, thinking they're being edgy and innovative
(after all, no-one else is doing it), only to produce a
completely terrible website. In the history of the web so far,
there has never been a good horizontally scrolling website, and
you're not going to be the designer who produces one.
Keep Flash Away from Scroll Bars.
Another common design mistake when it comes to scroll bars is to
think that you can do it better than the web browser, and use
Flash to create non-standard scroll bars. While you might like
the look you create, it will inevitably be less useful to your
visitors than a normal scroll bar would have been.
Your scroll bar won't be immediately recognisable as what it is.
It's unlikely to work with mouse wheels or keyboard shortcuts,
and you probably won't even let users scroll by clicking in
exactly the way they want. You end up designing a scroll bar
that's ideal for you, but frustrating for everyone else. However
ugly you might think the default scroll bars are, people know
how they work, and they're used to them - they don't want to
learn something new just to use your website.
Scroll Bars are Better than New Pages.
No matter how down you are on scroll bars, it's always a bad
idea to replace them with pagination. An article can easily
become three or four pages long with the user having to click a
'next' button to get from one page to the next, and that's just
unacceptable on the web - especially since, on smaller screens,
some scrolling will be required anyway. If you think users
dislike scrolling, then you have to realise that they dislike
waiting for new pages to load even more: if your site requires
them to wait for more than a few seconds between pages, they'll
abandon articles even if they're in the middle of reading them.