Scrolling groans
Several times over the past few weeks I’ve found myself becoming frustrated with gratuitous or poorly-implemented scrolling in Desktop apps and websites. Here are some of my experiences.
Picasa problems
It all started when I tried out Google’s Picasa. It’s just the sort of application I need to manage all my images, and I had really high hopes for it. But I just can’t cope with the way that Picasa’s scrollbars work. There seems to be an enormous lag in the scrolling mechanism as Picasa tries to display every single thumbnail on its scrolling journey. So if you drag the scroll bar to a different location, you have to wait aeons for the scrolling to catch up. And if you stop dragging before it catches up, the scroll bar pings back to wherever Picasa has got to in its tedious journey through every thumbnail. The upshot is that the scrolling never seems to be where you want it to be. The more images you have, the worse it seems to get. I’ve got several thousand pictures on my PC, and I find it virtually impossible to use Picasa.
What the Flock?!
Picasa was the starting point, but I’ve also discovered scrolling shenanigans with Flock (which I think has has the potential to be a great browser). One of the potentially cool things you can do with Flock is have your Flickr photostream viewable in a bar at the top of the browser and use it to pull images directly into posts as you write blog entries. The problem is that you navigate through the photostream using left and right arrows, with a scrolling transition effect between each “page” of images. Unfortunately, you can’t actually focus on any of the images while they’re scrolling. Instead, you have to wait for the scrolling to stop, check to see if the photo you want is there, then scroll again if it’s not. And so on. All you really want to do is click-check-click-check-etc. As far as I can tell, the scrolling appears to be pointless, inefficient and not a little disconcerting.
Ambient annoyability
Next on the spots-before-the-eyes offenders list is Shop Composition, which is a bit of a departure from your average, common-or-garden e-commerce site. It is, in many ways, very impressive: it’s 100% Flash; it has a lovely, clean style; it makes the most of the great-looking products it sells; it has a very slick shopping basket and checkout system. It’s even been suggested that it’s the best interactive shopping experience ever. It turns out that it also has fantastically annoying scrolling effects.
After selecting an initial category (“for work”, for example) and sitting through some pointless animated transitions, you get a big button that says “View full product line”. At this point 77 product images whizz past past your nose in about 4 seconds, before settling down to show just 5 of them with a draggable horizontal scrollbar. It’s like the conveyor belt from the Generation Game on acid.
You can then scroll horizontally through the products with the draggable bar, or use your mouse wheel (which is a nice touch). But visually, it’s still a little disturbing. There’s a ‘bounciness’ to the scrolling, whereby products are still decelerating and animating across the screen even after you’ve stopped trying to scroll.
Having said all that, I should point put that it’s been suggested that the initial scrolling, rather than being exceptionally annoying, might actually be a brilliant example of ambient discoverability. I’m not convinced, though. I reckon it’s too fast to actually see anything useful. Furthermore, lots of the products are variations on a theme, so it’s kind of overkill to attempt to show every single one of them.
River dance
The new River Island site also has horizontally scrolling product pagination. The implementation follows a more traditional model, and has a more positive and responsive feel about it. Ultimately, though, it still boils down to vertigo-inducing eye-candy.
Wacky physics.
Why am I not impressed with these scrolling mechanisms? I don’t have problem with scrolling per se – I use scrollbars every day on loads of Desktop apps without even thinking about it. The problem I have is, I think, to do with what I can only describe as scrolling implementations based on wacky physics. Scrollbars work well in standard Desktop apps because they they follow a very simple physical model. If I move the scrollbar, the page moves. If I stop, the page stops immediately at the point I’ve chosen. If I drag the scrollbar I have total control over the movement of the page in terms of speed and position. It’s a very simple, natural model, with a clear mapping between user input and the control and movement of the scrollbar. The scrolling problems I’ve described above don’t follow this model; the developers have gone to great lengths (a great cost!) to add in extra motion effects. This motion is applied to something I’m trying to control, but has nothing to do with my user input, so it feels like I’m not fully in control of the interface.
The bottom line is that it all boils down to that most fundamental of usability principles – User Control and Freedom. Ignore it at your peril.
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About
I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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