Is Scrolling The Best Website Navigation Choice?

There is no denying the fact that the number of mobile users has outstripped the desktop users. And this trend has driven UI designers to adapt accordingly. With a large number of users on smaller screens, scrolling has become more of a necessity for website navigation design. The less you see on your screen, the more you scroll. However, several other factors also prevail. Scrolling adds to the convenience of those users having access to high-speed internet. High-speed internet makes scrolling so smooth resulting in an improved User Experience thereby resisting users visit page to page.

Should You Employ Scrolling In Your Website Navigation Design?

Scrolling is one of the creative design approaches that can be limited to a few pages or can be infinite. The infinite scrolling has evolved significantly as Social Media websites have incorporated them for loading continuous feeds. However, scrolling is not all about scrolling infinitely. It can either be limited or continuous depending on your products or information that you portray. Let’s now look at some positive and negative aspects of scrolling.

The Upside Of Scrolling:

Boosts Interaction – A constant stimulation  and changing of elements can be an intuitive storytelling approach that bumps up user interaction.

Faster Content Accessibility– Scrolling loads content faster than navigating through any complex path and does not affect the user experience. Scrolling is one of the best practices in Interaction Design, where the perception of time is  crucial than the actual passing of time.

Persuades Users– The convenient navigation approach of scrolling promotes interactivity and increases the time spent on the website.

Responsive design – Pages designed with navigation options other than scrolling might look more complicated. Responsive Design can easily be employed in scrolling to improve the device adaptability.

The Downside Of Scrolling

SEO Issues- Scrolling follows the principle of single-page design. However, having a single page might have a significant effect on the website’s SEO.

Disoriented Design– There exists a disconnection between the scrolling and the content which might leave users with some kind of confusion.

Difficult Navigation–  Scrolling makes it a bit difficult to go back to the  previous page on the website. To deal with this, you may create a persistent top-level navigation where each and every item is anchored to the page section.

 

The Bottomline

Although scrolling is a smart way to display a number of items, but the success of their implementation has been limited to e-commerce or business oriented websites. So, one should be very careful while going behind scrolling approaches. Before employing this intuitive website navigation design approach, make sure you actually need the scrolling option for your website or mobile applications.