Long scrolling opens a lot of new doors to designers. However, this pattern has its own drawbacks. It requires designers to pay a strong attention to content, navigation, and animation. Here are 5 tips to follow to make sure that your long scrolling meets user expectations.
Provide Interesting Content Right From The Start
Despite the fact that people usually start scrolling as soon as their page loads, content at the top, visible part of the screen is very important. To make sure that people will scroll, you need to provide content that keeps your visitors interested. Thus, put your most compelling content at the top area of the page:
- Provide interesting facts (facts that attract visitors and keep their attention)
- Use engaging imagery (users pay close attention to images and pictures that contain relevant information)
Give Users a Visual Cue
Sometimes the best way to make users scroll is to directly ask them to do it. Simply inform users that most of the content is available below the fold. A subtle visual cue, such as an arrow pointing off-screen or a text “scroll down”, can inform users that most of the content is available below.
Keep Navigation Options Persistently Visible
Navigation is a make or break aspect of the user experience of a site. One of the biggest risks of using long scrolling in your design is a possibility of user disorientation. The obvious solution to this problem is to use a sticky navigation menu which shows current location and remains on the screen in the same position at all times.
Use Functional Animation to Engage Visitors
Creative effects like parallax scrolling and scroll-activated animations can engage users to scroll more. That’s why you should consider breaking up your page into scrollable “chunks.” Within each chunk, you can introduce the content through creative animations. As users scroll, animations transition them to the next screen while creating a path of content to follow.
Avoid Scroll Hijacking
Websites that implement scroll hijacking take control of the scroll and override a basic function of the web browser. Scroll hijacking is bad because the user no longer has full control of the page scroll and unable to predict its behavior. Users’ expectation of a website’s scrolling interaction shouldn’t be destroyed for the sake of narrative experience.
Long scrolling is able to create a completely immersive browsing experience. It’s completely possible to make a journey as enjoyable as the destination. When users like the content on your site and find UI intuitive, then they won’t really mind the length of the scroll.