Warmest Greetings,

:: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 ::

Make Them Scroll.

A study on speed and comprehension by the Software Usability Research Laboratory offers surprising insight into an old warning - "Don't make them scroll." These results should be factored into your own user case scenerios and website objectives, instead of accepting a new one-size-fits-all rule to go by. And, if your content is poorly written, no manner of reading it is going to be productive.

Click on >>> The Impact of Paging vs. Scrolling on Reading Online Text Passages

Quote: "The findings from this study show that participants using the paging condition took significantly longer to read the passages than either the full or scrolling conditions. Participants also showed no significant differences in their ability to answer comprehension questions correctly, nor in their perceptions or satisfaction of the reading conditions. This is somewhat surprising given that previous research has shown paging to be typically faster than scrolling (Dyson & Kipping, 1998). One might have expected that the Scrolling condition may be more time consuming given the users had to click the scroll bar more times to view the entire passage than they did in the Paging (3 clicks) or Full (1 click) condition. However, several users commented that they were more accustomed to scrolling when reading documents on the web. It may be that since participants had more exposure to scrolling they were able to read through the documents more quickly using that mode of navigation. Participants stated that they found the Paging condition to be "too broken up," and that they had to "go back and forth" quite a bit to search for information. It is possible then, that for searching as well, viewing more of the document on a single screen facilitated easier scanning."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/12/2003 08:35:55 AM

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