When you’re designing a UI, you usually put fixed items — the stuff you know will be there — in a horizontal menu. These are usually actions, like:
- Search
- Settings / Preferences
- Your Profile
- Etc.
This area is often called the action bar, and it’s horizontal because the number of items is predictable and limited.
But when it comes to things you don’t control — stuff that can grow — vertical layout makes way more sense. Take Libraries, for example. I have 4, someone else might have 8, 12, 24, or more. You can’t cram that into a horizontal layout unless you want to make people scroll sideways — which feels weird.
If the list gets longer than the screen, people just scroll down. We do that all the time. No one is surprised when they have to scroll through a forum, a news site, or pretty much any page on the internet. Vertical scrolling is second nature.
Now sure, horizontal scrolling can work — for things like image carousels, story sliders, or filter chips. But those are usually short, very visual, and give you a clear hint that there’s more to see. A long, text-heavy list? That’s way more comfortable to scroll vertically.
So yeah, just something to think about.
