[Sigia-l] Long scrolling pages and Usability

[Everett, Andy]

Stew et al,
        Does the long scrolling pages and usability also translate to other
content besides news, journal articles and retail catalogs. How do users
react to scrolling through 100+ lines of search results (assuming good
precision and recall)?

Thanks
Andy Everett
Data Catalog Administrator 
Washington State Department of Transportation
Evereta at wsdot.wa.gov

-----Original Message-----
From: Stew Dean [mailto:stew at stewdean.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 12:06 AM
To: donna at maadmob.net; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Long scrolling pages and Usability


Hi Donna,

This is exactly what I have found.  In general you have a few seconds to 
engage the users interest but once you have it the will happily browse a 
page. Users like lists if they are laid out clearly.  Many sites make the 
mistake of trying to present lists but break it into page size chunks under 
the misunderstanding that scrolling pages is somehow bad.  This leads to 
'postbox' sites where users are limited to viewing the whole website 
through an imposed window. Of course there are guidelines like you have to 
make it clear the page scrolls, and sideways scrolling is not liked much by 
users as they have to think about what's going on and work out the page 
scrolls sideways. Some also try to make the navigation constantly 
available. That's not an issue as providing the user knows where the 
navigation is they are happy. DHTML moving menus grab the attention to much 
and frames, well we all know about those.

Stew Dean



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