I had to read the article a few times to figure out that I was supposed to scroll horizontally. When I did that in Chrome on MacOS, the following happened:
- the notification widgets popped out from the right of my screen
- The entire center-aligned blocks of text on the page moved over in relation to my scrolling for some reason
- The browser navigated "back"
- The H scroll bar appeared for a few seconds then went away
Some of these were due to my cursor being outside of the 'nav class="sausage-links"' tag, but it seems strange to expect a user to first place their cursor inside of an invisible box somewhere around the nav strip to be able to navigate it by scrolling to and fro.
Seriously, H scroll is way overloaded, and there are so many ways to subtly "do it wrong". That, combined with the lack of affordance to show users that "there is more to see here if you scroll left and right" makes this a really poor UX.
- The entire center-aligned blocks of text on the page moved over in relation to my scrolling for some reason
This one kind of makes sense to me. It's the browser's way of telling you "you're doing the right thing to scroll the whole page over, but there's no content outside of your viewport so we'll just snap you back after we let you peek to see for yourself".
The rest... yeah, it's definitely an overloaded pattern.
- the notification widgets popped out from the right of my screen
- The entire center-aligned blocks of text on the page moved over in relation to my scrolling for some reason
- The browser navigated "back"
- The H scroll bar appeared for a few seconds then went away
Some of these were due to my cursor being outside of the 'nav class="sausage-links"' tag, but it seems strange to expect a user to first place their cursor inside of an invisible box somewhere around the nav strip to be able to navigate it by scrolling to and fro.
Seriously, H scroll is way overloaded, and there are so many ways to subtly "do it wrong". That, combined with the lack of affordance to show users that "there is more to see here if you scroll left and right" makes this a really poor UX.