Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Consider for a minute the humble scrollbar. This pillar of the graphical user interface has freed us from the spacial constraints imposed upon us by the printed page. It has returned us to the first ever writing format- the unpaginated, continuous flow of scrolls written on Papyrus. 

For web users the scrollbar is a key member of the WIMP family (windows, icons, menus, pointing devices), components of the graphical user interface (GUI) that revolutionized home computing in the early eighties. These tactile titans of the graphics world propelled us from the flatlands of the binary age to the shimmering pastures of the hyaline age: glossy buttons and drop shadows, things you could grip, drag, collapse, caress and poke with your pointing device.

For web designers the scrollbar has become a yardstick for usability with battle lines being drawn between the champions of ‘long scrolling pages’, and the advocates of ‘everything above the fold’. And lets not forget the ultimate web pariah- the horizontal scrollbar- an axis too far for the impatient content consumer.

But now it seems that the scrollbar could be an endangered species. Leaked screenshots from Steve Jobs new Mac OS X presentation sent ripples of horror through the blogosphere. There was something missing. A six pixel by infinity gash in the interface marked the scene of the crime. Somebody had removed the scrollbar.

As it turned out the scrollbar was still there but it had been relegated to a mere visual aid, only visible when using other forms of scrolling- fingers on a trackpad or the roller on a mouse. 

This is a landmark design moment because it marks the point where the ‘graphical user interface’ is starting to be usurped by the ‘gesture user interface’. Why jab your pointer sideways to move up and down when the flick of a fingertip can do it all? Why restrict interaction to the single coordinates provided by a mouse when you can use the infinite range of movement provided by your own body motion?

Our need to ‘thingify’ the virtual- to remodel the flat and abstract with the three dimensional and familiar will always be there but multi touch technologies and motion sensors give us the type of screen control that make the old staples of the GUI redundant. We can now grip, drag, collapse, caress and poke with the very things that bore those motions in the first place. The scrollbar has been killed by our bare hands.