Auto scroll: a review
A look at currently available products that feature auto scroll
I was scrolling through the Twitter feed on my iPhone recently, and repeatedly lifting a finger to scroll through the content, trying to find posts that I wanted to read, was too much for my lazy self. I wanted to find a solution to this problem.
The first step was to look at current products that featured auto scroll and see if this was a solved problem. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on auto scroll and will look at currently available products with auto scroll.
Part 2 will analyze the interaction of manually scrolling through Twitter.
Part 3 will attempt to develop a better solution for auto scroll.
User Needs for auto scroll
- The ability to stop the content instantly. This is important should the user wish to engage with the content.
- The ability to control the coarse speed of scroll. Any user will consume a different type of content at a different speed. An image feed is faster to consume than a Facebook newsfeed, which in turn is faster than a technical paper. To be effective in these varied situations, it’s important to be able to quickly set the coarse speed of scroll.
- The ability to control the fine speed of scroll. Even within the same context, there is content that the user might want to momentarily spend slightly longer on. On a newsfeed, it might be a post from a close friend. In a technical paper, it might be some trigonometry that takes an extra moment to recall.
Current Products
Amazon Fire Phone
Amazon have auto scroll built in to their upcoming Fire Phone. It takes advantage of their unique Head-Tracking technology, and adjusts the reference orientation based on the head position of the user. The speed is controlled solely by the tilt on the phone. Tapping at any point stops the auto scroll.
Samsung Galaxy S4
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 came with a smart scroll technology that uses the camera to detect where your eyes are directed. This is used to set the reference orientation. The top-to-bottom scroll speed is set using a left-to-right slider.
Instapaper
Instapaper sets the reference orientation only when you switch the “tilt-scrolling” feature on. To reset the orientation, you need to switch tilt-scrolling off and then on. There is no way to instantly stop the auto scroll.
Alien Blue Pro
Alien Blue, a reddit client for iPhone, was the first app that I saw tilt-scrolling on. Its experience is very similar to Instapaper’s.
Chrome for Android
In Chrome for Android the user browses through open tabs by tilting. This is a slightly different use case than the ones above, but is interesting nonetheless.
Discussion
All the above products make use of tilting as the only means to controlling the speed of auto scroll.
Tilt control considerations
- Controlling reference angle intuitively. We use our phones oriented in a ton of different angles—sitting up, laying down, contorted in any number of ways to avoid sun glare, and we frequently move between these positions. Ideally, the phone should be able to implicitly detect these changes and accordingly set the reference angle, which is the angle at which the speed of auto scroll is zero. Except the Amazon Fire phone, each of the above implementations required an explicit user action, unrelated to the natural scrolling, to re-set the reference angle.
- Disconnect control of viewing angle from setting desired speed. In tilting, the viewing angle of the phone is changed. There is a range of viewing angles outside which trying to read or assimilate information from the screen is inconvenient. In all the above products, setting the scroll speed implies either thinking ahead about the viewing angle, or ending up with an inconvenient angle during the auto-scroll. All the presented products require the user to be thinking ahead if they want to have the desired speed at the desired angle. In fact, with the Amazon Fire Phone, the viewing angle is inherently tied to the speed of scroll. It does, however, let you instantly stop the auto scroll by tapping.
- Mapping between tilt angle and speed. Since tilting is the only way of changing the speed of auto scroll, it needs to have ways in which to allow for coarse, as well as, fine speed control.
What are your thoughts on auto-scroll? Is it something that you use or wish to use? What are the problems you face with the present products? What are the things that delight you? What are the things that annoy you?
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Part 2 is out now!
