I was working on Susan Weinshenk's 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People over the weekend. She has a page about scrolling. What surprised me was that she said people will swipe horizontally and we all know they really don't like scrolling horizontally.
This particular issue has been coming up at my work, lately. We have some people who believe that some users are used to working in long tables because either they work in very large Excel spreadsheets or their job role is something to do with accounting. While there may be some users who are used to having to do the scroll left-right, I'm convinced that for most users, we should avoid it at most costs. Even in Excel they've tried to make it easier by adding the ability to hide columns.
This entry in Susan's book left me wondering, huh? I know I have no problems swiping horizontally and I don't really think about it any more, but I hate scrolling left-right. So, why? I physically started imitating the movements. The natural motion you make using a mouse is an arc. You are physically limited to this range by your wrist and elbow. On top of that most mouse pads don't give you enough room to scroll horizontally and we keep ourselves within that boundary. If you go past the mouse pad boundary, you do start to engage your shoulder. But by then the mouse is then a long distance away and fine movements aren't as easily accomplished. What it comes down to is that we have to start focusing on our body to create the straight horizontal line to make a horizontal scrollbar scroll instead of paying attention to the information in the scrolling section. We can't do both easily. Don't make me think!
But why is swiping different? Swiping on a tablet or a phone is usually done at an angle and it allows you to use your shoulder or finger on phones where we can naturally make a straight line.Both our finger and shoulder give us a 360 degree range of motion. And swiping doesn't have to be a perfect straight line to be read by the device.
So horizontal scrolling is never going to become a comfortable motion or behavior for us when using a mouse. That means we as designers have to take care that our tables and other information stays contained within the available width given to us. Most of the time in the enterprise world that means dealing with tables that go on and on to the right.
Because we are using web technologies at my company that means I insist that our business people identify the information that is primary to the user being able to complete the task on the page and identify information that is secondary or not needed to complete the task. Secondary information is usually hidden in a modal available via a link.You might have other technologies available to you that helps take care of the problem in another way, such as column toggling.
But limiting the data is really important. If you put too much data on the page it becomes a performance problem technically and people simply won't scroll all the way to the right through reams of information. So it becomes a waste of development time, etc.
I did accidentally find a brilliant way of helping business see the amount of data that users were being asked to scroll through. At the time I was creating these wire frames as we talked through the needs of the application that were made out of the big easel pads. So the page itself was in done in landscape. When I had to add this table with all the columns of data they wanted to be available to the user to the wire frame, the table itself ended up being more than 30 feet long. When I put up the wire frame at the front of the room, the table itself wound around the corner and to the other end of the room. Business started cutting columns...
I kept that wire frame for over 5 years just in case I needed to remind business what all that data really looked like proportionally to the rest of a page.
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