Jakob Nielsen is not wrong
This week’s Alert Box column takes up the question of scrolling and scrollbars. Nielsen makes two core points in this column:
— Sites should never scroll horizontally (horizontal scrolls are “abominations”!), and
— Scrollbars should always be recognizable as scrollbars
From a usability perspective, these points are hard to dispute. We certainly wouldn’t argue with the second point as this is a key frustration of Flash design (i.e. uniquely designed scrollbars that are impossible to find or use). But, regarding the first point, we’ve done a fair amount of thinking on the issue of horizontal scrolling and the related questions of screen resolution (or, if you prefer, “viewport size”) and advertising-friendly page layouts.
More than thinking, we have helped many of our clients think through the options and tradeoffs inherent in specifying a target viewport size for a new design. And we wrote a pretty nifty white paper on the subject — with pictures!
So, from the point of view of the practical application of design theories, we feel pretty good about our credentials on this point. And this is why we feel compelled to point out (with all appropriate deference to Usability’s Prime Mover) that the absolute view expressed in this column ignores (or glosses over) some key web design realities. Namely: in a world where users will access your site through a variety of viewport sizes, the only way to insure that no user ever encounters a horizontal scrollbar is to design for the narrowest viewport setting (probably something less than 800 pixels wide). While this is certainly one valid approach, there are a lot of good reasons to consider alternatives — most of which are covered in our paper, so we won’t repeat them here. Some of these reasons stem from a compelling business need to extract maximum value from each available screen pixel (even if some of those pixels may, for some users, require horizontal scrolling to be viewed). Nielsen insists that “users hate horizontal scrolling.” To this we say: users hate a lot of things that they find confusing or wasteful (including, in many cases, lots of blank space to the left and right of an 800 pixel-width page viewed through a 1024 pixel-width viewport). Design “rules” are great, but it’s not always easy to obey the rules and still accomplish all the business goals for the design. No designer can equally serve the masters of usability, aesthetics, and economics. In our experience, really good design (that is design that effectively accomplishes whatever its purpose may be) is born out of compromise.
So, okay, pile on…
July 19th, 2005 at 9:23 am
I’m currently working on a e-commerce site for a large computer maker and we’re allowing system comparison grids to scroll horizontally so consumers can “compare” specs. We allow the users to build these grids with as many columns as they want-so I don’t think that horizontal scroll bars are 100% bad.
July 19th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
Thanks for the comment, Tim. Yes, that’s a good example of a situation where a horizontal scroll makes sense. I would think that there are numerous examples where users would accept — or even prefer — horizontal scrolling if it meant that they were able to get view more information in a more effective way. To be fair to Jakob, I think we could differentiate this case from one in which a user encounters a horizontal scroll on a site “against their will.” However, the contention in our white paper, and the counterpoint we were trying to make to the Nielsen column, was that it is not always possible to guarantee the same experience for every user without significantly decreasing the effectiveness of the design overall — without appealing to the lowest common denominator.
January 13th, 2006 at 10:42 am
I had a lively debate about the horizontal scrolling issue with some of my fellow Mac users earlier this week when Apple announced their new Intel-based Mac models; as part of the launch, they revamped their home page at apple.com to require a 1024x768 window, as well as the sections devoted to the new iMacs and MacBook Pro. Interestingly, 2 days later, they revamped the home page *again*, back down to 800x600, but the new product sections are still at 1024x768.
Something tells me that Apple’s design & marketing teams are engaged in a raging debate over this issue even now!
According to one popular webstats service (TheCounter.com), 800x600 displays have dropped down to about 22% of the global market as of last month.
I’ve also put up a resolution trend chart on my own site (based on TheCounter’s numbers) which might be of interest:
http://www.brainwrap.com/faq/screen_resolution.html
January 13th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Thanks Charles. Great reporting! Hope you don’t mind that we promoted your comment to an actual post today.
May 4th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Maybe it’s a question of the surrounding context. For example, horizontal scrolling (and vertical scrolling) in an application like Excel is a horrible experience until you learn how to use the Freeze Panes command to hold the relevant top and left rows in place. With similar functionality (perhaps pre-defined), scrolling around left, right and center might be an enhancement rather than an impingement.