Scrolling

A small sentence, in a casual conversation on a lazy weekend afternoon in the studio, after a claim of not really having accomplished much on that day yet, except maybe scrolling a few miles before getting out of the house. I'd never thought of it that way, scrolling, in terms of distance. Nor had I really spent any time thinking about it at all, it's so ubiquitous, scrolling. You know, that thing you do with your thumb, or your index, on that screen. Like the tire on a car, or the shoe on the foot, the point that touches the thing that makes the other bit move. Or is it the other way around?

A scroll is a roll of parchment, papyrus, or paper, which has been drawn or written upon. The noun scrolling means the continuous movement of text or images on a display screen in either a horizontal or vertical direction. We tend to take the exploratory nature of the scrolling action for granted, a lot of web page design depends on the user being willing to move their viewport up and down the sequence of information.

But what are the metrics of this space? Are their any? Do they depend onthe screen you're using? According to what parameters do we change the sizes of the scrollable areas? Is it problematic that we may not all see the information the same way? We're leaning towards a computer world where touch interactions are as important as mouse and keyboard ones. In what measures is scrolling necessary to consider?

The illusion

Let's begin with reminding ourselves that this is in quite some ways, an illusion. We're now discussing an interaction method, thought up to solve a spacial issue. The one of more content than physical space. It's not a new issue, the word remind us of this, rolling up a long piece of text to make the partial and logical reading action easy is a good way of dealing with a spacial constraint. But is this what is happening in my browser when I read along an article? Am I alone in wondering what happens to the videos or gif loops I opened up in my twitter feed, then moved along? Do they play for eternety?

Today, the workings of scrolling are well established, but it can't have always been so. Computers have not always been these well able, fast processing, graphics machines. This act of panning has the prerequisite of content being loaded for it to be available. Computing speeds, graphics speeds and networking speeds are all dependencies for this to perform. As all these areas have developed to them feeling snappy enough for us to forget them as individuals. The consequence of these specifics getting out of our ways, other practices have developped: the types of content we now view and share are different, the resolution of the medias themselves, their overall availability. We're pointing to the fact that if scrolling is now a common nameable action, it has also followed a development. It's progress is still ongoing, and it's practice is now being bent.

We outlined that initially this interaction comes to solve a spacial issue. On screens, when content and space argue, designers come up with solutions. The last decade has seen handfuls of newly named disciplines appear in the web industry, jobs that deal with these types of issues specifically; interaction designers, user experience designers, web designers, wire framing, experience managers all kinds of strategies in place for choosing an appropriate method for visual online communications.

Narrative structure

It is therefor possible to think of scrolling in a narrative sense. The new web disciplines might not use that word very often, but designing communication connects quite easily to story telling. Hundreds of examples now show us the combinations of space, content and story. Remarkable that our systems are performing so well that we are far beyond the constraints of the first scrolling pages. We deliberately add space for content to have impact. Trends that confirm the connection between scrolling and story telling come and go. At the moment we can observe one-pagers, parallax scrolling and encouraging plug-ins that inform you how much text you still have to read. Amusing that reading (on screen) has become an achievement.

But the main observation I will make is that scrolling is possibly the main factor in the appearance of bottomless pages. We also know these pages of content as feeds, or timelines. These streams of content show how emphemeral our content is. How fast they disapear, replaced by other, similarly sized blurbs of something, aimed to be shared. The thinking now agues towards an even bleaker observation of the micro medias that make up these feeds: «if it doesn't spread, it's dead». Consequently, disturbing rifts happen when one tries to find back a piece of content from one of their feeds, with only time as a constant, it's not uncommon to only remember the context in which one of these blurbs was published, say the Twitter feed, or Facebook, but not the content itself. «I'd have to scroll all the ways back to yesterday to find that video again. I can't remember who posted it.»

The kind of distributive action that makes up 'social' feeds has a direct effect on the way we later look at more traditional streams of written content, articles, essays and what not. Part of our first set of actions when seeing a text focused page online / onscreen is an attempt to grasp the size and length. Exactly the way one skims over a paper book, checking the cover, the back cover, and quickly flicking through the inners. We have now integrated scrolling so deeply within our regular computer interactions, that it becomes part of the engagement with content decision process. Scrolling has changed the way we approach reading, not only visually; it is not news that legibility on screen is difficult, but simply structurally. The usable real estate on screen for text is very constrained, main factor of which being the fact that text now moves across a container, rather than moving the container to view more text. This is not helped out by the devices we attempt to read on, including all sorts of distractions, notifications and other tasks running along sides.

A prototype

The idea that such a space might deserve to be measured can be read in a few different ways. We have established how scrolling as an action has become easier, technically, but what about the content that the action enables. Is there a relationship between the quantity of available scrollable real estate and the quality of the content under your thumb or cursor? This remark is unlightly to be a result of the development of the scroll, but we can at least say that as content becomes more plentiful online, it's interesting that scrolling is available to interface the quantities. Maybe in this case, more is just more, and that can remain that.

User:Colm/RW&RS-scrolling-essay

Contents

Scrolling

The illusion

Narrative structure

A prototype

references