I am wondering whether there are any usability studies out there regarding natural vs. reverse (traditional) scrolling. I tried to google the matter a bit and it seems natural scrolling took off with some Mac OS version - but remains controversial even in the Mac community.
I generally find using a trackpad clumsy - mainly with regards to scrolling. I have, however, only really used reverse scrolling. My issues are only compounded by natural scrolling, but I am wondering whether it might end up being a better experience if I invested the time needed to get used to it.
I guess Apple must have had some intelligent reason for imposing a standard that needs so much getting used to on the part of their users. IS there any evidence that natural scrolling is a switch worth making?
Answer
Interesting question. This is what I could find after a bit of searching on the matter:
This article by Chen J, Proctor RW. (2013) seems to address this question. Sadly the full article isn't publicly available, but here is their conclusion (although it is hard to know what it is actually based on):
Conclusion: Scrolling in the direction of content movement yielded the best performance, and the scrolling effect was the main source of the R-E compatibility effect.
R-E compatibility is Response-Effect compatibility, and more discussion on this topic can be found publicly in this article by Janczyk, M., Yamaguchi, M., Proctor, R.W. et al. (2015).
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