Why can't we accept scrolling?

Feb 01 2008

Angie Herrera

Every now and again, during the development of a client's site, we'll get asked to make sure that people won't **have to** scroll¹. As if it were some sort of awful, icky, nasty thing we have to avoid at all costs. So I asked myself what is it about scrolling that people have such a problem with? People will give arguments about making it easier on the user. Seems like a reasonable answer, no? Kind of. As web designers, we should be making every effort to make the user's experience a positive one (i.e., minimizing clicks, making things clear, keeping the navigation simple, etc.). And for a while - albeit I'd say that was a good 5-10 years ago - vertical scrolling was seen by many as a nuisance. Like it were some action beneath us mortals that for some reason or another made websites annoying. As time went on and as people started to see websites as actual marketing tools (thereby including more relevant content), scrolling became, well, another fact of life. A fact of the web. And because of this I strongly believe that scrolling is something that people are used to. So that takes us back to my original question: why can't we accept scrolling? Truth is, the only answer I could find was aesthetics. In other words, we're determined to control the web in the same way we control the printed page by making it fit our design, our look and feel. But that's just looking at the web incorrectly. Ethan Kaplan has said it best: > Scrolling is an endemic paradigm, not something we should subjugate for the purpose of aesthetics. To put it more simply, scrolling is a part of the Web, a part of websites. Period. Some pages scroll, some don't. And quite frankly, trying to take control of this *default* behavior is rarely a good idea. The web was never meant to be fixed the same way a printed piece is. It's interactive by its very nature and has so many variables that designing for it - regardless of project - is a challenge in and of itself. And that, by extension, means it's not completely under our control. But that's where the beauty lies. It's working *with* the medium as opposed to controlling it that allows us to create stunning results, scrolling or not. ****** 1. Here I'm referring to vertical - up and down - scrolling; horizontal - side to side - scrolling is rarely, if ever, a good thing.) ↩

I completely agree! Scrolling is acceptable, but not if it's for millions of pixels, so to speak. Thanks for sharing!
Posted by Angie Herrera on 2008-02-14 15:31:52 An amusing read. Here is my take: Some scrolling is perfectly acceptable, but the extreme of this argument is that you put all your information on one single page, thus making the task of navigating to the information you want almost impossible. I've seen many websites out there that do exactly that, and by and large (well actually always) they're unreadable junk. The argument used for pro-scrolling here could just as well be used for the written word in other forms. Books for instance: Thousands of years ago, documents were indeed scrolled. Then books were invented and things got a lot easier! Books, just like web pages come in many different shapes and sizes. The key thing is to make them usable. Scrolling on a web site is perfectly acceptable as long as its used tastefully with an eye on practicality. This very page is a great example. The whole scroll takes up maybe the space of two unscrolled web pages. Now, if a million people decide to answer this blog, then it'll scroll forever and no one will ever read it - such is the marvel of the blogoshpere.
Posted by Justin Fisher on 2008-02-14 12:14:51