tobyaw: (0)
Toby Atkin-Wright ([personal profile] tobyaw) wrote 2012-11-25 05:05 pm (UTC)

I find repeated horizontal scrolling to be quite an unnatural movement. Holding an iPad or iPhone with hands at the sides, with one’s thumbs on the screen, a vertical scroll feels natural and repeatable, whereas repeated horizontal swipes feel awkward. .

I think horizontal scrolling is the sort of thing that people would say that they like in focus groups, but as soon as they try moving through a significant amount of text it would drive them mad.

Worth noting that apps designed for reading a significant amount of paged content — Kindle and iBooks — allow taps as well as swipes for page-to-page navigation (and I always tap for regular forwards movement through a book). These book-reading apps also make good use of the screen space, and display a decent amount of content on each page, unlike the odious Onswipe.

Oh, and the latest version of iBooks has added the option to view a book as a continuous vertical scroll, like a regular web page; perhaps this is an acceptance that paged content doesn’t actually work very well on a screen.

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