What are your thoughts on page scrolling in a business application?

Question

Let's say you are designing a web application for internal business use. Should a page be designed to not scroll, and either use paging or have scrollable sub-sections (tables, grids, etc) or is it better to allow the page to simple scroll.

What happens when you have a long page that requires a Save/Cancel button or other such buttons. Then you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to find said buttons. Or just repeat the buttons on the top and bottom?

Sorry this post is not worded well. It was hastily written. Hopefully you get the gist of it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If a page is used for heavy data entry, then it probably shouldn't scroll at all. If not, then I think making a non-scrolling page has many more downsides than upsides. I've seen the end user's experience hindered more than helped by insisting on no scrolling because people tend to get "creative" to avoid scrolling.

Answer 2

Recently I ran into a paper describing UI guidelines for a banking system. It gave an easy-to-remember principle "Horizontall scroolbars MUST be avoided, vertical scrollbars SHOULD be avoided".

This sounds reasonable enough for me and I'm trying to follow the principle for a while - to create forms that are visible on single screen in the beginning. If necessary, I add expandable sections (which in turn yields vertical scrollbar after expanding the section)

Answer 3

I know at Blue Elephant jewelers we tried to not have the user have to scroll. If you look on smashing magazine they posted a great article on usability studies and there is a comment on scrolling. You might want to do some user acceptance testing to find out what your users like.

Here is a link to the article on smashing magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/

Answer 4

well, first of all, it is my belief that if you're building a web-application, it should use the metaphors web-users are accustomed to. that means scrolling is perfectly legal in my mind.

second, if you have a form that long, you may want to split it up into several smaller forms. another solution would be to float the 'save' & 'cancel' buttons on some form of toolbar, that will stay with the user at all times (possibly using CSS position:fixed or some other similar trick)

Answer 5

Designing an application so there is no need to scroll is always good - especiallay in web applications people will miss elements outside their "view-range".

Scrolling can be very annoying and might be an indicator for too much content on a website.

You could try to use expandable areas for different categories or something like a tab-catalogue. Even a wizard is a possibility.

Another possibility would be locking the buttons on the bottom of the browser (not of the page itself). So there would be a scrollable area with the actual content and belwo the buttons.

Answer 6

A couple of ideas:

1. If you are scrolling the whole page, one idea that can help(to an extent) is to put the 'save' and 'cancel' buttons on both the top and the bottom of your page, a la Gmail.
2. If you are using scrollable sub-sections, you can pull the 'save' and 'cancel' buttons outside of the scrolled section, that way, the buttons are always accessible.