Some design patterns I find that go well together with scrolling:
Dynamically Fixed UI - like the sidebar on this very blog, for instance. Once a user scrolls past the top-most point of a certain UI element (like a menu or table-header) said element becomes ‘sticky’ and becomes fixed on screen. Now that mobile devices are beginning to support CSS’ position:fixed style, this could become a more common sight on sites.
Animated Anchors - i.e. those links you click on and that scroll the page for you. Really handy because it not only takes the user to wherever he or she wanted to go, but at the same time also educates them on the layout of your site, and their position within it.
Infinite Scroll - i.e. that AJAX trick to load in fresh content at the bottom of the page whenever a user scrolls past a certain point. For immersion, this cannot be beaten; If done right users can just lose themselves in the content before realizing just how long they’ve been reading the same page.
The downside with this is that when a user clicks a link on the page, and then hits the back button, he or she will be thrown back to the top of the page. I can imagine a suitable workaround to this involving a just-in-time history push-state using History.js, so that when the user returns, they’re only taken back to the last page-fragment that was loaded.
The rising popularity of tablets and other touch-screen devices will only serve to increase the need for good scrolling user experiences.
Many years ago, clicking was the simple answer to this question. The general thought was that if you made your page too long, users would only view and read the top half and glance over or ignore the bottom half. Today, things have changed. Many users do scroll to the end of the page and have no problem doing so. Scrolling has become a second-nature and clicking a chore. As user behavior changes over time, designers need to take that into account in their designs.
Anecdotally, I can vouch for this – show me an over-paginated page or other form of UI and I’m far less likely to explore your content than when it’s all organized on a single page. And with non-accurate input methods, such as a touch-screen, clicking can be an even bigger chore, if the site isn’t optimized for touch.
I’m here to offer a different perspective, at least when it comes to software piracy. While the unauthorized duplication of software no doubt causes some financial losses in the short term, the picture looks a bit different if you take a step back. When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.
Interesting take on the piracy issue from the perspective of a vintage computing enthusiast.
I was drafting an article much like this one, but Craig Grannell beat me to it and makes almost all the same points I was going to make.
The movie industry is like a fancy restaurant serving some of the best food in town, but then employs scumbag Maître D’s to spit in your food, right before they serve it to you. Also they give you the bill before you get your meal. And they chain the plates and utensils to the table so you wouldn’t try to steal any of it.
Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.
If I had a euro for every time I’ve been forced to sit through that god-awful “you wouldn’t steal a car“-ad… You know how many ads a pirated movie forces you to watch? Exactly.
If you only have one eye, you don’t have depth perception. If you’re able to look at things with one eye in the 21st century and the other eye in the 20th century (or possibly even the late-19th), it provides a kind of perspective that otherwise wouldn’t be available.
Gibson is one of my favourite authors. Good interview.
1801 – Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave “hello, world” into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.
Tuesday Jan. 24, 0555 hours EST — A Coronal Mass Ejection is expected to hit Earth at about 0900. EST (1400 GMT) today, according to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
The radiation storm has remained at the S3 (Strong) level, but should now be at or near its peak, and is expected to begin to decrease soon, NOAA says. The SWPC forecast is for Moderate level geomagnetic storming with higher levels possible.
Supposedly we should be able to see the aurora in Belgium, but alas, it’s cloudy.
How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
A pretty damning case of Google losing sight of their core business. Google+ is actually making search worse, as evidenced by this bookmarklet that un-does the “socializing”.
