Stop Making Me Scroll!

When making a website, developers must keep in mind the sheer variety of options and configurations that users will view the site through. Users may be on a computer, phone, tablet, game console, or something else not listed. From there, display space varies, with newer phones and tablets showing more on screen than older versions, dedicated computer users having bigger, better monitors for a larger workspace, and console users coping with a wider distance between user and screen. Even then, web browsers will differ, with users of different devices opting to use their preferred browser (or not being given a choice). As a result, websites must be able to cope with all these variations, lest a poor design drive away users and, potentially, customers.

To do this, I have noticed several tricks observed though my many hours of navigating the internet in effort to stave off ennui. First is to use many resizable pictures, they can always be repositioned on screen size and will appear to annoy users of all devices. Second is to never put any useful information where visitors can easily find it. You will want to put many vague sentences in-between the giant pictures mentioned previously. Third, space out all the text as far as it can go, you will want both the line spacing and kerning to be wider than an obese whale. Fourth, make it so that this one design is standard to all devices. This way, you can save effort overall. Fifth, make liberal use of hover over animations and large loading icons in general. Sixth, put everything on one page, with any menu clicks being used to automatically scroll the page down to the relevant section. As a bonus, make it so I have to make an account and log in to view anything that is not a box telling me to log in or make an account, even if I’m trying to find out what your service is.

In case you have yet to notice from my tone of writing so far, web developers, please stop doing this. I should not have to resort to a combination of Google and Wikipedia to find things from your site that I need. Annoying your users more than that burst pipe last week will not endear me to your services. Designing everything this way does not help, even on mobile, which it was undoubtedly made for in the first place. Large photos with spaced out text looks good a first glance, sure, but it quickly becomes obnoxious to read and follow. Scrolling to find anything works okay on mobile, until I accidently swipe and watch as I lose my place. On desktop all this scrolling achieves is wearing out my mouse wheel. If you went for the extra credit and decided to force accounts, it’s even worse, as I need an account to find out about your site, but won’t make an account until I know what it does (really, I could be signing up for cat facts, for all I know). I get that this happens to be the current trend in web design, and that it works well across devices, but at the very least, stop making me constantly scroll.