So — Do we need to ‘fix’ scrolling?

Scrolling doesn’t need to be fixed

Seeing scrolling as a problem goes hand in hand with the much discussed ‘above the fold’ argument, the urge to place everything important in the initially visible area of a page. There are many interesting articles and UX studies about the topic, I’m going to link just two of them below. In a nutshell most of them prove that user engagement peaks exactly on or right below the fold, making the ‘above the fold’ argument invalid.

http://blog.chartbeat.com/2013/08/12/scroll-behavior-across-the-web/

In my opinion this user behaviour comes down to two reasons:

Users are impatient. They don’t wait until a page is fully loaded to scroll and discover the content.

Users have learned to scroll. In a mobile-first world scrolling has become the number one interaction with digital content. Never-ending newsfeeds have taught this interaction to users over and over again.

As a result, many pages and blogs (unknowingly) embrace this behaviour. Most of them, including the most popular Wordpress themes around, feature a prominent media header at the top of the page. We call it ‘mood-setter’. It has no specific function attached to it but helps do prepare the user for the content that follows below, where engagement happens.

So, users scroll. A lot. Does this mean there is no scrolling problem?

Not exactly.

Bad responsive design needs to be fixed

Our customer has a point: When users want to skip a section (on their current page) that they are not interested in, they have to scroll through all of it’s content. As a result the organisation lost potential customers on the way.

But the real problem isn’t scrolling, it’s lazy UX design: using the same old desktop design patterns and adapting them for mobile.

There are hundreds of possible solutions to this problem, most of them feature a mobile-first approach and the idea of progressive enhancement. But just like many desktop navigation solutions don’t work on mobile, many mobile navigations don’t work great on desktop either. Take tab-bars for example: They are considered to be one of the most effective types of navigation for mobile applications. But still, they are quite uncommon on responsive websites. There is a lot of space available on desktop pages — why not use it to show content from different areas of your service instead of hiding it behind a navigation link? On the desktop it’s all about teasing different areas of your page to generate interest. On mobile it’s more about making a lot of content easy to navigate on a small screen.

Responsive Design is always about compromises, it’s about finding adaptive navigation solutions, that work on all devices and all sizes. But our current desktop and mobile navigation patterns just seem to be incompatible.

So how can we fix our customers responsive design?