Sunday, November 2, 2014

Today I learned: People hate scrolling long websites on their smartphones.

Being the geek I am, I talked to my sister-in-law's husband about mobile design of websites. And while I was happily scrolling a mobile website on his smartphone (Yeah, I know, I like taking others' smartphones and scroll on them a little bit. For science, you know. Gloating over jank-free animations on websites and such stuff.), scrolling through a site (yeah, the scrolling was cool), he just told me:
"I hate scrolling long websites".

First, I though: Well, okay, nothing special. I also was already a little bit bored by scrolling around, so I kinda agreed. But then I thought: "Hold a moment. This might be a golden hint for a better user experience on mobile websites.".

Why does he thinks so, I wondered? Being already annoyed by still scrolling on that site, I started hating this site, also. So what was wrong?

I think I've got it. There are several reasons, why scrolling long page can suck so hard on mobile devices:

  1. It depends on what you're scrolling. I'm pretty sure, that Pintrest users love the never ending scrolling, filled with more and more and even more wonderful photos about the stuff that interest them. Walls of text, on the contrary are massively boring to scroll over.
  2. Do you really have to scroll all that boring content just to get to the content you are really interested in? That stinks.
So, if you design a new mobile website, avoid scrolling. Or make it awesome, at least.

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