Scrollbar Blindness • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#132

Post by sitkack » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:21 PM UTC

ManskY wrote: post #116

supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge. There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

Please don't blame people for wanting when it is "the design" department that forces these changes on people.

How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.

Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#133

Post by namank » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

site-packages1 wrote: post #114

supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

I've been super annoyed by trying to grab the scroll thing on the bar in a super long pdf. It keeps disappearing and on long PDFs where I want to scroll to, say, the middle, it disappears before I can precisely grab it. It's maddening sometimes.

I resort to the down key to make the scrollbar appear without losing my position in the doc. In fact, in Preview, my default workflow is to click on the main content panel as soon as the doc open; else the down key might take me to the next page, which defeats the purpose.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#134

Post by initself » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

This trend is sickening. Windows 10 has a nearly 1 second delay when mousing over the Start Menu scroll bar. Why wouldn't I want a scroll bar there? It is the primary thing I seek when I click Start.

In the Gmail Admin interface for users, the scrollbar vanishes unless I have my browser nearly maximized. Do the designers live in a world where their browser is always nearly full screen?

You'd think huge companies would notice and care about these things.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#135

Post by doktorhladnjak » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

x87678r wrote: post #98

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

> outside of your country ... most people do not have a Mac, I think you mean outside of the Bay Area. For PCs/Desktop Apple has like 12% market share in the US. 7% globally.

People in this bubble overestimate the popularity of anything Apple.

I once had a discussion with a coworker at a major company known for its app, where I was complaining about an Android bug and he genuinely asked "does anybody even use Android?" And I responded, "only the majority of users in every country around the world including the US. It's even 50/50 on our app!" Afterward, I found the internal numbers for employee use of the app was 96/4 in favor of iOS, and this included employees outside of tech and outside the US!

He, like so many others, was totally oblivious living in the Bay Area tech bubble.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#136

Post by jfengel » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

From a UX standpoint there's a big advantage to monoculture: the user learns a thing once and applies the idiom everywhere. For most users, diversity of options means having to learn every option. They'd rather have one good thing -- or even one good-enough thing.

The world does have a variety of options, so users need to live with the fact that they're going to have to discover things, and designers are going to have to live with the hassle of designing for users with a variety of experiences. That makes the best possible UX worse than it would otherwise be. It's a necessary evil, but it's not surprising that a lot of developers try to wish it away, especially when they can get away with that, at least initially.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#137

Post by bstar77 » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

I have dealt with this problem in an Electron app I designed and support. The different platform scrollbar behaviors drove me mad because of my insistence on a common experience.

I really like the hidden scrollbars that Apple settled on. They are easy to identify by hovering the cursor over scroll-able content and they just act as an overlay over the content. In windows, the content is actually shifted the width of the scrollbar which is terrible for UI consistency in some cases. There is the problem that hidden scrollbars remove the "discovery" aspect of traditional scrollbars, but I find this to be a very minor loss in practice. I don't miss having a sliver of a scrollbar for large content blocks.

I ultimately just settled on styling scrollbars in CSS, making them a bit slimmer and forcing that behavior on the Mac for consistency. Scrollbars look nice, match my UI look and feel, minimally shift content and look consistent across all platforms.

I threw away all of the custom JS approaches that try to mimic Apple's solution because none were perfect and, in every case, introduced new problems that disqualified them entirely.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#138

Post by kergonath » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

bradstewart wrote: post #88

newsbinator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full stack dev, 8 ~ 12 hours a day on my 2015 MBP 13" touchpad. No regrets.

Interesting. Despite my efforts to consider that people have different preferences for almost everything in life, I am constantly surprised by my assumumptions about how other people do things that turn out to be very wrong. It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wron…

My main problems with touch pads in general is that they are not smooth enough (meaning that rubbing your fingers in them for a few hours gets unpleasant), they have clicky buttons that need to much force to activate (which strains the finger you use most to click), they are too small so things like drag and drop often require intermediate steps, they are not sensitive enough (so you often need to repeat gestures, particularly 2-finger scroll; tapping almost never works the first time).

Apple’s touch pads (at least the recent ones) have none of these problems and are as smooth, responsive and reliable as good smartphones. They are actually useable as a main input device, not only in a pinch.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#139

Post by Filligree » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

x87678r wrote: post #124

vbsteven wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the macOS monoculture is going to go away in the next few years because on one side macOS is becoming more and more developer hostile with each release and on the other side WSL (and WSL2) is improving the Windows developer experience a lot. I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.

Linux on laptops is getting much better too. Is a great alternative now for developers.

So long as you don't need HiDPI, multi-gpu or good touch-pad support.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#140

Post by the_af » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

ManskY wrote: post #116

supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge. There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

It seems to me these UX changes are almost never driven by what actual users want or need.