Introduction

Scrolling is a common task in the everyday computer life. It is performed several times a day in completely different scenarios. The WIMP paradigm affords the use of scrolling in the popular computer interfaces since content and display space are nearly always counterparts. Mobile devices like pda, cell phones or ebook readers encounter the same problems. The idiom of scrolling has become a main activity in daily computer interaction similar to the doubleclick. The rise of the popular scrolling wheel demonstrates the importance of this basic interaction.
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Distraction

One main issue in current computer systems is distraction. The computer does a very good job in doing a lot of thinks parallel and some of these things even give feedback to the user (’You got a new mail‘, webpage could not be opened, new software updates are offered, Instant Messaging pops up, etc.) The user is easily distracted from his main work. The interaction design of systems should focus on the outcome of the users work since that is the reason why the he/she is using the system intentionally. Distraction is thus something that should be avoided for guaranteeing a fluid workflow.
Reading long texts on the computer screens has always been a hassle and there are several different solution out there on how to improve screen reading in general. As mentioned in the introduction scrolling is very much part of the daily computer experience but scrolling is very much part of distracting the user from a reading flow as well. Victor Kaptelinin concludes in his study ‘Transient Visual Cues for Scrolling: An Empirical Study’ that “first, the [above] results suggest that scrolling can be a significant source of reading distractions. Disruptions occurred immediately after scrolling accounted for almost 30 percent of all disruptions observed in the experiment.” This distraction has one of its reason in the way the computer provides feedback to the scrolling action of a user.
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Feedback

Feedback of a users action is one of the most important topics when human beings interact with different systems. Victor Kaptelinin did a study on the feedback of scrolling and he suggests that the “the window display ‘old’ lines as temporarily “dimmed” (but still readable) immediately after scrolling.”

1. I see a discrepancy between dimming of specific letters in the scrolling feedback and the visual path the eyes of the reader follows. If the computer could recognize which word the user is reading right now and only dimm the words that he/she has been reading already then I could see a positive effect on the reading experience with this mechanism.
2. Dimming lines for showing that these had been present on the screen before ignores the complex formatting possibilities of text. How is Kaptelinins system going to work on a column layout text?

But besides these two issues his study shows that a rich visual feedback on the scrolling mechanism could increase the overall reading attention.

Suggestion

The distraction of scrolling a page by hitting the page down/up key or clicking on the scroll bar or hitting spacebar is reasoned in loosing the orientation of where the eyes rested before the scrolling command was invoked. There is a short amount of time where the users eyes needs to relocate the position on where to continue reading. This relocating time could be minimized if the scrolling process would be accompanied by a visual feedback, which slowly fades out when the scrolling process is over. There are several ways on how this feedback could be visualized. In the following demo I used a block and a single bar as an indicator on where the visual end of the page was.
The advantage of this simple and non-textual approach is that it can be used in various scenarios. It is in no way connected to the layout of the content displayed in the window.
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This idea is not about bars or blocks it is about suggesting that the feedback of scrolling should be improved by providing a visual hint on where the end of the page resided before the scrolling was invoked.

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