Kevin Dugan posted some thoughts about the unusual design of the Urban Outfitters blog and asked David Armano and I what we thought. What's unusual about it? It features a horizontal scroll.

Well I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for horizontal scrolls. After all, my photography blog uses a horizontal scroll. That said though, you need to consider the audience, the type of content and how you want people to interact with the content.

One of the issues with a horizontal scroll is that you want to keep the content height short, so you don't introduce a vertical scroll as well. Now you're limiting the content you can display based upon a design limitation. The beauty of a vertical scrolling blog is that each post can have a different height. Sometimes you might post a single sentence, other times a long article.

With a horizontal scroll, every post needs to fit in an imaginary box. With my photography blog that's not an issue since all I show are photos with a brief caption. With Urban Outfitters it's similar. They have a photo and then some brief text, but they can't expand upon this.

However, most blog and web site readers are used to a vertical scroll format. While a horizontal is a unique design twist, will it annoy people in the long term? I don't know of any sites that I visit frequently that use this format. My thoughts are that the initial 'hey look at that' functionality of the Urban Outfitters blog will give way to usability issues.

But you might say, why diss that format if you use it? Well I do use it, but my photo blog is not meant to be something you look at often and it isn't a major content piece. It's more of a gallery format. I would venture to say that Urban Outfitters intent is to constantly engage the readers with new content.

Of course if the majority of your blog readers are RSS subscribers, then your design is a moot point :-)