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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

Note to designers: stop overlaying divs on top of your main body content. Users press the Page Down key, and it obscures the first text lines of the next page under the navigation, or top banner, or whatever you've placed so cleverly up there.

It's frustrating, impedes the reader's experience, and makes people not want to bother with your content.

Okay, done with my UX rant. Sorry. Thanks.

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It breaks scrolling too -- if you scroll more than a few pixels down the page, the div jumps position and all the text moves vertically. Really horrible UX

That's why I don't understand why people are so opposed to good ol' <frame>s. You could resize them AND they wouldn't torture you if you used page down/space key...

When I see that garbage, I just close the window. Treating one's readers with open contempt doesn't seem like a good strategy to me.

I actually came across this Firefox bug pretty recently:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780345

It shows how browser makers can help alleviate the problem.

Why are you using page down? No scroll wheel, old habits, on a laptop?

Its something I've never used and have never thought about while designing, seems like a lot of websites are ignoring it as well; fb, techcrunch etc.

I use space for page down and shift+space for page up. Scrolling means tracking where I am as I go, when I hit page down I know where to start reading, the top. It feels more like reading a book.

It's hard to get more optimal than "read a page of text" "press button for next page". Scroll wheels require some combination of

* Have to move it more to travel the same distance

* Have to fiddle with it to get exactly one page

* Have to track your position during the scroll

* Have to scroll more often than once per page

This (among numerous other near-universal UX transgressions) has gotten to the point that my first action on almost any internet article is to hit ⇧⌘R.

I've always read at the center of the page while scrolling. It's what I've noticed most everyone my age doing. Maybe it's generational, I've only been at this since windows ME.

Maybe because he wants to go exactly one page down as easily as possible, and this is something that has generally worked for decades. It's pretty simple, really.

Wow brilliant!

Off the top of my head, Facebook and Mashable do this, it's becoming the standard.

It doesn't help that most laptops have lost the Page Up/Down key. Just a thought.

Space for page down and shift+space for page up are pretty common too.

I've never seen a full laptop that didn't have a PgUp/PgDn that wasn't a Mac.

Some netbooks do have these keys removed, but certainly not "most" laptops.

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