Up or Down: Directional Stimulus-Response Compatibility and Natural Scrolling

Abstract

The settings of scrolling direction (e.g., whether scrolling up or down to move the display content up) on current computer operating systems are discrepant, which may impair users’ performance and user experience. To evaluate the alternatives, we conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, we simulated the way people read and scroll on a computer by asking participants to press the up-arrow or down-arrow key to scroll the screen. In Experiment 2, we eliminated the scrolling component by including only a location-judgment task. We examined directional stimulus-response compatibility in the scrolling task and the location-judgment task. Results showed that responses were facilitated when the control direction was compatible with the display content movement direction. This finding is consonant with the Mac OS X Lion operating system, which defines the default scrolling direction as “move content in the direction of finger movement.” We recommend that other systems adopt this directional compatible mapping.