To scroll or not to?

Jeavon posted the below on our internal intranet in response to a question regarding a site we are designing.

Web usability guru Jakob Neilson says:

We know from user testing that users hate horizontal scrolling and always comment negatively when they encounter it. Customer satisfaction is surely reason enough to avoid horizontal scrolling. There are two other reasons as well:

·        On the Web, users expect vertical scrolling. As with all standard design elements, it's better to meet user expectations than to deviate.

·       When pages feature both vertical and horizontal scrolling, users have to move their viewport in two dimensions, which makes it hard to cover the entire space. For people with poor spatial visualization skills, it's especially challenging to plan movements along two axes across an invisible plane. (Typically, users score lower than designers on spatial reasoning and visualization tests.) In contrast, one-dimensional scrolling is a simple way to move across content without advance planning: you just keep moving down

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html

The horizontal exponents say, a horizontal website is innovative and quirky, check out http://www.thehorizontalway.com/

Useful webpage utilising JQuery to provide some nice scroll bar navigation in an attempt to work around the "usability issues"

http://www.littleurl.net/80f592