[Sorry, I did'n know this system does not support punctuation marks supported by word processors. Repost.]
David, I was too laconic in my previous message and did not explain what meaning of "interference" was used. Webpage scrolling is an automatic activity involving perceptual and motor skills working in concert. This automatic activity is unconscious and effective. A portion of user's cognitive load allocated to scrolling is very low. In other words, the user do not "think" about how to scroll a page, he simply scrolls it, and it scrolls. When you place second scrolling mechanism (slider) on a webpage, you introduce a dissonance into automatic scrolling activity. Now for the same task -- scrolling -- there are two modes of operation: one for the scrollbar, another for the slider. (Slider cannot be operated by a mouse wheel; it is not clear how to scroll down exactly by one page etc.) As a result, a user is faced with two different scrolling controls and his automatic skill became damaged. Unconscious became conscious: the user starts thinking about how to act in each case. This is what I meant by "interference", a cognitive interference. Then, imagine a realistic situation when at the current moment of page scrolling only a half of the slider is visible on screen while its another part is hidden below the bottom edge of the browser window. This is a real dilemma for a user: which of two scrolling mechanisms to use: scrollbar or slider? Finally, I do not think the concrete example of a slider you mentioned in your initial message is very different visually from a scrollbar. Mentally rotate that slider by 90 degree right and imagine that current webpage is long and therefore its scrollbox is small: in this case a slider and a scrollbar will look as twins... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42001 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
