Not so long ago I was a big forum goer. Facepunch Studios (Garry’s Mod Forum) should have been my homepage because it’s where I spent a lot of my off-time just surfing around for nothing in particular except the social interaction. I would occasionally spread my wings to other websites to read about new topics and meet new people. Then rather suddenly I got sick of it, you could say I quit that partition of the internet.
Was it the people? The low average IQ of the commentors? Yeah that was part of it but a major aspect of my decision I believe had to do with the lack of progression not gained from scrolling through the seemingly endless pages of content laid out before me.
To maintain the interest of viewers I believe there needs to be a feeling of accomplishment gained from visiting a website. Obviously the core of the solution to giving this feeling to the viewer is having good content, but a simple method is to make the user feel like they know where they are on your/any site. Navigation is of course the overhead and probably one of the most important factors, but the design itself should also be there to guide the user throughout each page in obvious and not so obvious ways.
As I spoke about for horizontal spacing relating to backgrounds the same concepts can be applied to your allotted vertical spacing as well. The vertical treatment of your site has to move the viewers eye where you want it to go. All too often I feel disconnected from the content after scrolling down past the majority of a pages main design and want to either finish the article and leave or quit reading and return to the top of the site where I feel safe.
Designs such as these are wonderful and it’s truly a pleasure to visit, however, if too much content is placed on the page of such a site you find yourself in a void of gray as you scroll down to read. Subconsciously you know you want to get it over with and return to the top so you can see the rest of the site. That’s not what we want at all.
So back to our solution: make the user know where they are. We must think of our goal in many ways. Blogs for example must have obvious beginning and ending points for each entry with, preferably, an expected length. Every page needs a title for a sense of place and each entry should feel grouped together as a solid entity that when you are finished reading you feel accomplished at having read it and hopefully even gained something from it. I went one step further and experimented with a repeating gradient background to give a looping sense of progress as you read each entry. Play around with it, go ahead and scroll really fast and see how it makes you feel. I for one thought it to be rather successful.
There are many ways to fix the lack of progression from generic website scrolling. I’d love to see what your solutions are for this web design problem and if you have made or seen any elegant solutions then post them in the comments below I’d be really interested.
