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Comment by babebridou | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm not defending my decision to do it that way, it comes down to a habit from my Swing days, a good one then, and probably a bad one now that I'm working to correct. I'm just stating the plain fact that I have my way of doing it, Apple have their way of doing it, and Android has no way of doing it.

I believe the right way to be something else, though: Never display a list that mixes data and actions. Even better: never display a list at all. Lists are bad for the user. Scrolling is bad. That's my honest belief.

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"I believe the right way to be something else, though: Never display a list that mixes data and actions. Even better: never display a list at all. Lists are bad for the user. Scrolling is bad." - Interesting, I'd love to know if there is more of a reason for this, specifically why scrolling is bad?

Either way, it's an interesting idea, and I'm tempted to agree with you. I would love to see the open source community, Android included, expand on what is done on this one site, and continue testing, discussing, and demoing theses types of user experience and interface questions, so we can all benefit from it.

I've tried to reason my belief. It's hard. The only really earthly reason why I don't like scrolling is that (don't laugh) touch interfaces hurt my fingers. I actually feel pain whenever I touch the iPad or Xoom's screen, or my macbook pro's touchpad. I gave my magicmouse to my sister no more than a couple hours after I had purchased it, because I knew I couldn't sustain the mix of friction & electrical pain for more than a minute at a time.

I honestly don't know what came first, the pain or the repulsion for scrolling in general, but the association is fierce.

Then I started reasoning on why people would prefer a world without scrolling. The first thing that came to mind is that scrolling does not exist a lot in real life, apart from a few instances: using binoculars, using a magnifier, going forward/backward on some sort of static security camera looking at traffic or something like that. For everything else, we naturally use paging. Paging is strange: using two or three fingers, you can page by any amount you see fit, and every time, the entry you're looking for is on display at the exact same place on your eye. Items can be specified with their page number (324), then a 2D position (fifth line, seventh word). At some point you can even use muscle memory to reach the correct page while you position your eye for receiving the info.

Scrolling also has an interesting attribute: it's entirely a computer concept. You have a buffer of information and you increment the offset. But as an end user, using only scrolling, you can't easily perform things such as dichotomy - everyone knows dichotomy even if they don't know the name of it. Go forward a bunch, go backwards half a bunch, go forward half of a half of a bunch, find the entry.

Another thing that I don't like with scrolling is how it messes up with the "5-7 modulo 2" rule of thumb for decision making (1). It's not that there are more elements than needed, it's that they get pushed up & down when you scroll, so they never appear to be a fixed point in space where you can go in a subset of 3-9 destinations. As a result, you can't select a subset from 3-9 subsets, and you can't select an item from 3-9 items, you actually have to scroll all the way and parse all elements in order to make an informed decision from, say, 15 or 150 possible ones.

All these questions (and more (2)) itched me since the day I realized that there could be a computer world without scrolling and maybe we could start dreaming/having nightmares about it... Anyway this is a belief and I'm generally a man of reason - it's tough to put it into words what you know you definitely can't prove :)

(1) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

(2) : mouse wheel fatigue when browsing websites or expanding trees, why isn't a newsfeed or a time related search result on a logarithmic scale so I can see it all, always, since the start of the century, why did we mix UI and content on webpages when we could simply remove the navigation panes...

Have you used Flipboard of iOS? I think it's a well done implementaion of non-scrolling, though you still need to use the touchscreen, it's just a quick flick.

I've used Flipboard when it came out. I found it excellent but didn't get much value from the kind of content that it would produce for me back then, so it didn't stick. Part of me wonders if their success comes specifically because they didn't feature any scrolling.

Anecdote. I think scrolling on touch screens is tremendous fun and wouldn’t want to live in a world without it.

Aye, I'd be sorry to work against your fun :)

I see touch scrolling as a great implementation of the wrong solution.

1. Scrolling is not a "computer concept", it comes from scrolls.

2. Paging and scrolling are different things. Paging can works well when you're dealing with things that don't need compared (like a list of names in a phone book) but it breaks when you want to compare things.

Consider a spreadsheet or log file: you might want to compare any two given rows, and if they're split across a page break, it's a nightmare.

1. of course, I completely forgot about the original scrolling for some reason.

2. I agree with you, but by itself a list is not any better for comparing rows. It's only better in the edge case where you can display the two rows on the same screen in the list but not on a pager, and even then it's visually hard to get the job done.

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