Web designers are constantly confronted with the problem of displaying large amounts of information in confined spaces. To deal with this designers usually have two options, either present the information on one long scrolling page or divide it into smaller amounts on multiple web pages. Studies have found that shorter documents that require more paging tend to be superior in both performance and preference to longer pages that require more scrolling. For example, Piolat, Roussey, & Thunin (1998) found that participants who paged through documents had a better mental model of the text and were better able to locate relevant information and remember its main ideas than those who scrolled. Schwarz, Beldie, & Pastoor (1983) found that paging was preferred by inexperienced users but did not find significant differences in task completion time or search performance. Other studies have also found no differences between the two methods in terms of user performance (see Mills & Weldon, 1986). However, almost all of he studies that have been conducted were done prior to the advent of the Web.
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