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<title>Bidirectional Scrolling: Why Not Both?</title>
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<h1 id="bidirectional-scrolling-why-not-both">Bidirectional Scrolling: Why Not Both?</h1>
<p>2020-11-09</p>
<p><em>I recently came across Adam Silver’s post <a href="https://adamsilver.io/articles/bidirectional-scrolling-whats-not-to-like/">about the merits and pitfalls of bidirectional scrolling</a></em> and found myself conflicted with the design arguments put forth in the article. It’s a very good article overall, and I suggest giving it a read before digging deeper into my post here.</p>
<h2 id="the-premise">The Premise</h2>
<p>The original article argues that displaying page content via horizontal scrolling (and therefore slightly hiding interactive content) creates a few major issues:</p>
<ul>
<li>it increases the chance users won’t see it</li>
<li>there’s a greater reliance on digital literacy</li>
<li>it’s generally more labour intensive for users</li>
</ul>
<p>Adam also makes a solid statement here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Having to scroll down and across in a zig zag fashion can be tiresome, especially for people with motor impairments.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But I don’t believe these issues create a need to completely remove the horizontal “scrolling” design altogether. You can still implement the <code>See All Items</code> category link, while allowing the horizontal content to load in <em>dynamically</em>. Balance is always key.</p>
<h2 id="not-all-at-once-please">Not All At Once, Please!</h2>
<p>So what exactly do I mean by <em>dynamically</em> loading in horizontal content?</p>
<ul>
<li>The user is shown the top 4 items in a given category</li>
<li>From there, the user can use the <code>See All Items</code> link to jump into a full category page</li>
<li>If they so desire, they can begin scroll horizontally in a given category row
<ul>
<li>Once they reach the end of the row, 4 more items will load in automatically to expand the list</li>
<li>To avoid a never-ending list, it might be best to limit total row items to ~20 items. At this point the UI could prompt the user to <code>View All Items</code> in that category.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>By loading the row content in piece-by-piece, initial loads for users will be faster and subsequent list items will load quickly as well (since they would limit to a set default - in this case only 4).</p>
<h2 id="final-improvements">Final Improvements</h2>
<p>Below you can find a quick, static version of this concept. Here you can see the horizontal list items, along with their corresponding <code>See All Items</code> links. You’ll have to use your imagination for how new items would load once you each the end of a horizontal row. (I’m too lazy to spend extra time building out that functionality for a hypothetical blog post)</p>
<p><a href="https://codepen.io/bradleytaunt/pen/pobxpXz">Live CodePen Example</a></p>
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