The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - displaying infos: scroll bars or scrolling screem

displaying infos: scroll bars or scrolling screem

Hi all,

Currently on our Intranet we have spaces devoted for scrolling infos (250 x 250 pixels). Now we want to revamp it, we will have basically the same real-estate for the infos but we are debating whether to remain using scrolling automatically from bottom to top continuosly, or use scroll bars at the right so users can click on it to view the whole infos.

Of course the ones who wants to maintain scrolling news arguments is this is to allow all news to be displayed - and to have scroll bars the users will only read the upmost news (not necessarily the most recent news but most probably the most important ones). The ones who prefers scroll bars said that if you have to click something on the infos to go to another page you will have to wait until the news appears.

Just want to know what is your opinion/preference ?

Thanks

Emmanuel Hyest
Wednesday, January 14, 2004

sorry to mistype the title..it should be screen instead of screem :)

Emmanuel Hyest
Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Ah the politics of the Intranet homepage. I know this drama well. Have you thought of just headlines and little pop up's (layers, not windows) if you mouse over a headline? The window should scroll if there are enough items.

www.MarkTAW.com
Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Automatically-scrolling text is a classic example of the compromise that leaves everyone unsatisfied. Slow readers will feel rushed, fast readers will get frustrated waiting for the text to scroll, and half the time, you end up waiting for the whole thing to roll by until you can read the sentence at the top that makes it all make sense.

Use scrollbars, or as suggested previously, headlines that you can click on (or hover over) for more information.

-Mark
Thursday, January 15, 2004

My preference is a "crawl" -- think of that thing at the bottom of CNN -- where there's a speed control, a "hey, go back the other direction a bit" control and when you mouse over the thing, it slows right down. We have such a crawl on some of our internal pages here, and I keep it set on "maximum speed". If something catches my eye, I can either mouse over it, back it up, or wait for it to come around again.

The nice thing about long, skinny crawls as opposed to square boxes is that you can easily have a whole bunch of them at the top edge of the screen without them interfering with each other. That way you can have a news headline crawl, stock price crawl, bug-database-statistics crawl, etc.

Eric Lippert
Thursday, January 15, 2004

Principle: "the user has the control", not the application/the site, etc.

So, for me, scrollbars.

Pierre A. Damas
Thursday, January 15, 2004

I would vote none of the above and drop the scrollbars totally.

While scrolling areas might have a function on passive media, like TV, they are very user unfriendly on webpages. Auto scrolling areas are even worse, because, like animated gifs and flash, they distract when you want to read other parts of the page. Think of it like having to read a book or newspaper where there is a scrolling section at the top of each page. Would you like that?

There is a reason why Yahoo, CNN (I never saw one), Microsoft, IBM and the BBC don't have scrollbar sections on their front pages.

Instead choose the boring solution and put a few static news captions in the area and let the user click them if she wants to read more.

Jan Derk
Thursday, January 15, 2004

Yeah I agree that the 250x250 box isn't the ideal place for lots of information. I know this is a political issue, and if you have to go for movement I prefer the "crawl." Heck if you can make it look like the CNN one more power to you.

Maybe spread out the same real estate across the bottom of the screen.

Is there any way you can use Flash to improve the situation? Rather than scrolling, perhaps they headlines fade in and out, and mousing over the area pauses the headlines, and you have a back & foward arrow to get back to a headline you missed.

www.MarkTAW.com
Thursday, January 15, 2004

The scrollbar is daft. Nobody like auto-scrollers.
Just display some items in the box (e.g. most recent or some sort of priority queue) with a small "more news" link at the bottom of the box that goes to the news archive page where you display a long list by date.

Just me (Sir to you)
Friday, January 16, 2004