Monday, April 21, 2008
Scrolling: No Longer a No-No
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Xflickrx, via Flickr (CC license)
Could Web navigation preferences, like tolerance for scrolling, be just another sign of a generation gap? |
Thou shalt not scroll once was a primary tenet of Web design. The intent of that rule was to appeal to an audience accustomed to reading traditional print media -- people who wanted a fast overview of the page, and then scanned it from the top-left corner downwards.
Things change -- especially online.
This week I attended a conference of the Wage Indicator -- an online project focusing on wages and labor conditions around the world. There, teams (usually including journalists and academics) from 25 countries compare notes on their operations.
Michal Pryslopski, head of the new media department of Rzeczposlita (the second-largest broadsheet in Poland), explained how he used the interface of the Wage Indicator in a successful campaign: "Compare your salary with that of your neighbor." He said he did not see huge differences depending on whether the banner was placed on top or lower on the page. Eyetrack research showed that conventional wisdom was changing -- his audience had become more inquisitive than previously assumed. They are abandoning the habit of focusing on the top-left corner of the page.
According to Pryslopski, scrolling also no longer presents a barrier to online readers: "The only thing that would stop people from scrolling could be a huge advertisement, suggesting they had reached the end of the page."
In the ensuing discussion, a range of possible explanations arose. On participant observed that scrolling may have become much easier over the years. Others speculated about a more structural change -- where a new generation of readers, with no solid tradition of reading print news media, would develop new and different online news reading habits.
Following this theme, it was suggested that in the U.S. (where 70 percent of Internet users are over 30), online audiences might cling to more traditional reading habits. In contrast, a country like China (where 70 percent of net users are under 30) might face a very different situation.
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