uturn - detect scrolling behavior with a requestAnimationFrame debounce

uturn.js is a small library for detecting people who change scroll direction while viewing a webpage. It uses the requestAnimationFrame events to run at 60 frames a second.

Getting started

Run the function on your site. We run this in the article pages, because those are the pages we want to create scroll events for.

Events

Create event listeners on one of the three events:

• scrollChangeToUp The desired behavior is to detect a user who scrolls up, after reading.
• scrollChangeToDown This is triggered when a user is scrolling down. This is meant to reengage the reading experience.

Callbacks

Set up eventlisters based on the above events.

You need your own functions, but here are examples:

document.addEventListener('scrollChangeToUp', function(){
  // Put function here that triggers when scrolling up
});

document.addEventListener('scrollChangeToDown', function(){
  // Put function here that triggers when scrolling down
});

Recommendation

When implementing the events on your own site, I recommend setting up a variable on your site that saves the visible/hidden state.

Example:

document.addEventListener('scrollChangeToDown', function(){
  console.log(_visible);
  if(_visible == true){
    hideWhileScrolling();
    _visible = false;
  }
});

document.addEventListener('scrollChangeToUp', function(){
  console.log(_visible);
  if(_visible == false){
    displayWhileScrolling();
    _visible = true;
  }
});