Horizontalism
Over the last year, we’ve observed a slow transformation in the orientation
of text-heavy Web designs. Not only are designs gaining depth and realism,
but navigation is changing as well. Some designers are augmenting
traditional vertical scrolling with sliding navigation, which usually scrolls in
both a vertical and horizontal direction, or even pure horizontal scrolling.
This is called “horizontalism.”
Websites with horizontal scroll bars have been more difficult to navigate
because the mouse was designed for vertical scrolling. But the emergence
of multi-touch devices forces us to rethink the usability concerns of such
designs. After all, whether the user browses vertically or horizontally on
such a device doesn’t really make a difference. And some plug-ins (like
Scrollable and jScrollHorizontalPane) simplify the action by enabling users
to navigate horizontally by using the standard vertical scroll wheel on the
mouse, thus shrinking the learning curve.
Horizontal scroll bars have been out there for a decade, but today it feels
that they are gaining a new context. The move to horizontal scroll bars is
probably an attempt among some designers to provide a more distinct user
experience. Such designs are usually carefully crafted and found primarily
on portfolio websites and elaborate e-commerce websites. Whether
horizontalism will expand to more types of websites remains to be seen in
the months to come.