Scroll Hijacking

Sites like Milwaukee Police News and Apple’s recent string of product 1-pagers are beautiful, but hijacking a user’s scroll rate for marketing purposes has to be one of my least favorite things in web design these days. Perhaps there’s a time and a place for intensely “immersive” experiences, but those experiences shouldn’t dramatically change how basic input devices operate. Rather than consuming the page, I worried I broke my trackpad and grew tired of the 3+ second delays while trying to explore each section.

There comes a time in every URL’s life where it needs to decide whether it wants to be a powerpoint, a movie, or an actual website. I think a video player or slide switcher that operates independent from scroll seems like a more web-friendly approach. If the goal is to eliminate one’s ability to browse freely within a page then maybe it doesn’t belong in a web browser after all.