Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design professionals. We work with a variety of companies across Manchester, and the North West, including those in Blackburn and Chorley, to provide high quality web design solutions. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about horizontal scrolling in web design.
What are the most effective design options for horizontal scrolling in web design?
Horizontal scrolling might be something that many mobile users are used to, but this is not applied in web design very frequently at all. As a result, it is essential that you get this right, for the best possible results. If your website users become frustrated or bored because of the horizontal scrolling experience, they are more likely to simply leave your website completely. To prevent this, you should consider a number of important and different design options and considerations, including:
- Using clear visual cues that make it obvious that the user should scroll horizontally- If your website user reaches your landing page, and scrolls down to see no further content, and no indication that there is more content to see if you swipe sideways, they are highly likely to think that your website is instead unfinished, and simply leave. However, with clear visual cues, the intention will be obvious, and your website users will be able to use the content intuitively. This will improve the user experience significantly, and help prevent a high bounce rate.
- Using buttons- adding interactive elements, such as buttons and arrows allows website users to have more control over the flow of the page, and the movement. This can be a great way to ensure a positive user experience, as users always feel more positive when they are not stuck waiting for content to change, and can instead speed this process up themselves.
- The type of content to show- choose carefully the type of content that will be shown through horizontal scrolling. Any form of text that requires scrolling is generally a bad idea as this can lead to your potential customers or clients needing to scroll backwards and forwards to complete reading the sentences, which is something they will not be inclined to persevere with. However, image content, with small text chunks, can be a perfect choice, and this can allow you to display more content on screen, without taking up the whole of the page.
- Responsive web design- your website will need to be responsive, and have a great quality for mobile users as well as desktop users. In practice, this means that your horizontal scrolling features will need to responsive too. This means not using any hover effects that wont work for mobile users, and ensuring that the sizing of each content type is suitable for the screen size. All buttons will need to be effective, and text will need to be resized appropriately too.
For more information or for professional web design support, get in touch with the team today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.