fl0blog

The internet is full of usability problems, most of which are already thorougly described in books and websites.

One thing that I’ve not yet read about, but that’s been bothering me nonetheless, is the decreasing usefullness of the scrollbar. These days in the blogosphere, the scrollbar is becoming less and less accurate as an indicator of an article’s length. It used to be like this:

• You arrive at a page via some random URL that you clicked.

• Your read the first paragraphs; it’s looking interesting.

• You check the scrollbar, and it indicates that you’re already 35% along the page. This means you have time to quickly read the rest as well. If it’s way longer, then you either bookmark the page, save it, print it, or leave it altogether.

Nowadays the last step is like this:

• The scrollbar tells you you’ve only advanced 10% trough the page. You suspect that ten to seventy percent of the page consists of (crappy or insightful) comments that you won’t read anyway. So you have to scroll down until you discover where the content ends and the comments begin. Only trough this horribly ineficient method can you decide on your future reading (or, in effect, ignoring) strategy for this particular article.

My recommendations (which I will of course lazily ignore myself until you, dear reader, contribute enough comments here ) :

• Include an indication of content length in every longer article (e.g. ‘this article is 5000+ words long).

• Hide comments by default and show them when the user requests them (e.g. with an ajax-style ‘expand’ click). You could make them magically appear when the user has scrolled all the way down, too.

• Fix the scrollbar so that it can visualise the different content types in your page (e.g. header, content, comments, advertising). This could of course be based on some microformat embedded in XHTML.

• At least have a clear visual distinction between ‘official’ content and user-contributed, unofficial stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 15:45 and is filed under English, Usability, Web stuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.