proposal

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?