[Sigia-l] Scrollbars

[jamie foggon]

I've just had an inverse discussion with a designer who strongly
favours standard scrollbars over any other solution such as dhtml. I
was arguing that various other approaches could give powerful ways of
navigating, whilst keeping the user sufficiently informed about the
content list (length, position etc) - which admittedly a browser
scrollbar does very well.

Context:
We're working on a site targeting young, mostly web savvy people and
trying to maintain a clean feel (no scrollbars littering various
overfowing divs) without affecting the usability. The current version
of the site is here: http://www.m-buzz.com - we're defining the next
release now.

The whole site is AJAX driven, and I want to keep with the
application-like feel of no page relaods, and no clunky scrollbars
dynamically appearing as new content loads. For example, if we have
blog-like content, I would prefer to have AJAX next and previous
arrows rather than a long scrolling page. We can add contextual info
such as which item the user is viewing, how many items there are - as
well as 'Back to start' or even jump to date perhaps. Although the
user would not have a clear indication that 'I have scrolled about 40%
of the way down this page' does this matter?

Does anyone know of any interesting research on this, or have any
comments or examples?

Thanks,

Jamie