Content-aware scrolling

When working with digital content on a screen, we spend an awful lot of our time scrolling. Two things in particular can make this very ineffective. One is that you often want to traverse content linearly that is represented in two dimensions, for example some text that’s in several columns on a page. If your screen isn’t big enough to fit all columns, you end up having to scroll up and down and left to right repeatedly to read it.

The other problem is that a lot of the stuff you scroll through may not actually be important. If you’re interested in particular parts of a document, everything in between feels like a waste of space while scrolling.

Edward Ishak and Steven Feiner of Columbia University have devised a technique for dealing with these issues. Their solution is to identify the content of a document that’s relevant to a task and to determine a meaningful path through it, which the user can then move along with a special scrollbar. This achieves two things: the user’s one-dimensional action can be translated into movement through two-dimensional content, and “unimportant” areas can be skipped automatically. Actually, rather than simply skipping them, their system “flies” over these areas at high speed, while at the same time zooming out to help you keep your orientation.

You can see the the technique in action in this movie, which gives you a good idea of how it works. As part of their research, they implemented this for reading multi-column PDF documents, for jumping between search results in a text, and even for traversing all the faces in a photograph.

Content-aware scrolling illustration

The content-aware scrolling path through a two-column text document, for search results and for faces in a photo. Dashed segments are flown over automatically.

The issues this design addresses are particularly pertinent to hand-held devices with small screens. Other approaches in this area include tilt-based scrolling, momentum-based scrolling and zooming. But even though scrolling in two dimensions may not be so common on today’s large desktop screens, finding a place in a long document is, and content-aware scrolling has the potential to help even here. Unfortunately, this first study didn’t include formal user testing, so the real-world usability of the technique is still uncertain.