4. 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 (like here), 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-commmerce websites. Whether horizontalism will expand to more types of websites remains to be seen in the months to come.