There has been a lot of talk about the effectiveness or lack thereof of embedded scrollbars used on web pages. Those scrolling pieces of content that are contained within the body of a webpage.

Web users scan text when looking at a web page. They take in the first couple of keywords of each phrase and make assumptions on whether it’s interesting or not before continuing. This happens in a split second. So think about that user that hits your site, briefly scans through the content to see if it’s useful to her, misses the scrollbar and all the wonderful content which goes with it and bye bye, you’ve lost your potential customer.

A lot of users completely miss the scrollbar. So if you’re an e-commerce site and a user has to scroll to view your product, chances are that some users are going to assume that you have a very thin offering of products! This is particularly true if you don’t use the standard scrollbars that most users are familiar with – default windows or mac scrollbars. If it’s flash based or is unusual in any way, you have less chance of the user identifying that they need to scroll.

Then there’s the frustration effect: If a user has to keep scrolling to view content they’ll get frustrated and go elsewhere. Web users are fickle, most of them come to a site to find specific information – this is the nature of the web.

Sometimes it’s unavoidable to use scrollbars, but I’d recommend, where possible, to remove them. If you have to use them, make sure that they’re a standard look and feel.