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Proposal

Scrolling is a fundamental part of the web experience. It is a central and key interaction for almost every website.

But scrolling within web browsers has been optimized specifically for continuous homogeneous content, like text.

As story telling in this medium matures, often heterogeneous media is desired to provide a more compelling and engaging piece. This content has typically been broken out into its own separate platform, leaving the experience disjointed.

Likewise, for interactive visualizations that need to progress through a series of steps, buttons have been utilized to explicitly walk the user through the content. However, this requires the user to use custom controls to engage with the visualization.

Can scrolling be utilized to provide intuitive and seemless interactions in complex multimedia interactive visualizations? If so, how might we implement these using open web technologies?

This presentation uses Mike Bostock's "how to scroll" as a starting point for discussing the use of scrolling in data visualization and interactive story telling.

We will look at a number of examples of scrolling, as a form of progressing a story, from the NYT as well as other sources.

We will dive into the implementation details of some of these examples and outline a set of tools that can be used to create your own scrolling interactives.

We will also compare different scrolling strategies with other successful techniques like steppers. Human-computer interaction research (and perhaps some fun mechanical Turk data if I can design and implement an experiment) will be used to provide data around the effectiveness of these methods.

Finally, we will see how these strategies change in the mobile web. Can the same implementations be used in both environments? or is swipe the new scroll for this more tactile experience?

Ideas for what Might get included in talk:

History of the Scroll

Start at the beginning - for comedic effect.

Scrolls vs Books

Scrolls - as the start of recording history in some civilizations - wiki scroll

Replaced by Codex (books) wiki books

The reason pages beat scrolls in the physical world was better UX.

• easier to transport.
• a codex allows random access, as opposed to a scroll, which uses sequential access.
• bla bla bla - other examples

Data vis on scrolls vs data vis in books. (perhaps make the case that scrolls had some benefits over books in this arena in terms of UX & access)

Fast Forward to the Creation of the Web

(insert humorous timeline of events between scrolls and scrolling - xcd style)

Some things have changed

Question to research: What was the original thought around the web page - was it more of a page in a book or more of a scroll on a shelf?

Show early mouse and scrollbar examples

• scroll allows complete access all at one time.
• But UX still isn't great

Today - things have changed again

Mice have turned into track pads have turned into touch screens.

Now the experience is ready for the scroll, but is web technology?

Interactive Storytelling

Its relation to data visualization

Its use of mixed media

Data visualization

Steppers vs Scrollers.