Scrolljacking 101

Summary: Altering the normal pace or direction of scrolling can contradict user expectations, control, and freedom. If businesses adopt the pattern, they can minimize usability risks by weighing it against functional value, cognitive load, and user efficiency.

Scrolling is a basic interaction that enables users to see pixels that span beyond the length of a screen height. Scrolljacking is a relatively recent design trend that involves changing the normal pace or direction of scrolling on a website. In our usability testing, we observed that websites with scrolljacking exhibit significant threats to user control and freedom, discoverability, attention, efficiency, and task success.

What Is Scrolljacking?

Consistency and following established interaction conventions improve website usability. When it comes to scrolling, users have strong mental models : they expect to scroll vertically, at a consistent rate that is related to how they are physically interacting with their input device.

In most computer operating systems, the default scroll speed can be manually adjusted to be more sensitive or less sensitive, but it is always consistent. Users expect a consistent scroll rate across all the applications on their devices.