Scrolling and time

When you conceive of web design as narrative design—when you’re doing what I call web as experience—you end up borrowing techniques from temporal media, like film.

But what leads us to do web as experience at all? A lot of practicioners come from marketing, yes, which is all about narratives and storytelling and journeys, but there’s a technical reason nudging things in that direction, too. Web as experience has to deal with a fact about the web that web as resource doesn’t.

The nature of web

A web page is (more or less) a static thing, but you cannot see all of that thing at once. You’re always looking at just a portion of the page, through the sliding window of the browser’s viewport. To progress, you have to scroll. This is not unlike video—a video is not something you can see all at once. In a video, the passage of time moves you forward. On the web, scrolling takes the place of time.

Moreover, a web page is an ambiguous medium. It’s not a page of a book; it’s not a poster; it’s more like a blank sheet of paper which could become either thing. But whatever you make it into, it will have linearity imposed on it by the fact that you’re in a browser and have to scroll. The temptation, or the necessity, to borrow from temporal media comes from these two facts taken together: the ambiguity of what kind of medium a web page is, and the linearity imposed by being unable to see the entire thing at once.

Posters vs. pages

So how are you approaching web design? The tradition in which you’re rooted makes the difference in how you have to adapt to the properties of the medium.

Are you approaching the web as a graphic composition, like a poster, or a magazine spread? Seeing a poster through a sliding window is unsatisfying, because a graphic composition is ultimately a unity. You want to see the whole of the composition. And if you’re not able to see it all at once, then there’s pressure to make the parts of the page you can see at once into their own compositions, with their own unity, and to link them up using temporal techniques. Hence, the animations as you move along the axis that substitutes for time, and the breaking up of the page into a series of “moments”.

Or are you building the web like the pages of a book—that is, are you just writing text? In this case, a sliding window is perfectly natural, and is in fact the same logic of an eye moving across the page. The eye can only focus on a small amount of detail at a time, and plus, a linear progression is expected. There’s no need to take in the whole page at once; you read a word, a sentence at a time, and you can’t go out of order.

I think it’s apparent that in the age of billboards, TV commercials, and film, the way a modern marketer approaches media is more rooted in the graphic tradition than the textual. Thus web as experience is their natural path, just from the nature of the web medium.