Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#371

Post by SilasX »

noodlenotes wrote: post #315
reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

Being tech savvy can be a burden when it comes to discovering new features because you're afraid of making a "stupid" mistake. Accidentally posting to Facebook is something the tech illiterate do, not us , so why would we click a random icon when we're not sure if it will do something embarrassing? I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when 1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly e…

Yes! I've lost count of how many times I've e.g. opened Google Calendar from my current Gmail window and have it pull up the calendar on a different account with no warning that it's doing that. (If I'm not logged in on the other, it asks me to log in with no option to go to the original.)

Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#373

Post by breakfastduck »

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…

It’s so strange to me to read these kind of comments, and to even see this article.

I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen.

It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!

No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#374

Post by projektfu »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #365
munchbunny wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I openly admit it these days. If I had a VCR today I'd be the one struggling to figure out how to record something with it, even though as a kid I loved that stuff. And I'm only in my 30's. It's not really about whether I'm able to figure it out (if 8 year old me could figure it out, 30+ year old should be able to as well), it's about whether I have the patience for a badly designed UI. One of the common responses I…

I am sometimes amazed how complicated UI can someone create with e.g. four arrows and two extra buttons. Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button,…

Monitor buttons are particularly awesome. Often you can't even see what you're pressing because it's behind the bezel or just an unmarked capsense location, and then whether it's up, down, increase, decrease, forward, back, reset, etc. is all different for each page of settings.

Bonus points: turn the monitor to portrait mode and do it sideways.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#375

Post by hellofunk »

brute wrote: post #306
hellofunk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of countries use a 12 hour clock, that’s a strange claim to make.

Judging from this [1], even more countries don't use it. [1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34950/which-large...

This source is not very trustworthy. No one usually uses 24-hour format in a few places not noted here, such as Holland, a decent-sized European country that many people have heard of. But they are not shaded in this chart. So I wonder how many others are also not shaded.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#376

Post by mixmastamyk »

derefr wrote: post #251
mixmastamyk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.

The UIs of the OSes designed in the 640x480 era used 8pt system fonts, and were very careful about "spending" vertical space. The UIs of the OSes of today are not optimized for the same scenarios. Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern…

As mentioned the dpi reasons you described are somewhat unrelated. But there is one factor, the move from 4:3 to 16:9 ratio monitors, which is less efficient in terms of usable area.

Given that most scrollbars are vertical however, it isn't a big deal. I've gotten more vertical space from putting my taskbar on the left (when 16:9 became ubiquitous) than anything other change.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#377

Post by HenryBemis »

reaperducer wrote: post #163
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…

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

+1 on that. I had to use a Win10 machine with Chrome. And stupid Chrome has default to open PDF files, while my machine downloads the PDF.

On Chrome I could't get the button to appear so I can save the PDF on my drive. Completely frustrating.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#378

Post by kbenson »

reaperducer wrote: post #163
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…

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

There's a language to UIs that evolves over time. The menu hamburger, the on/off circle with a line. Take those back a decade or more and you would have the same problems, but eventually they percolate through people's experiences and expectations and you can rely on people knowing what they are now, for the most part (it helps that the on/off icon is used for physical devices too).

Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#379

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

narag wrote: post #195
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

Windows keys started the nightmare for me decades ago. So nice hitting one of those while gaming full-screen! This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since. I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?

Doesn't windows 10 have a gaming mode that disables that key in full screen?

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#380

Post by saagarjha »

marv3lls wrote: post #366
saagarjha wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when search bars were table view headers, you had to do non-trivial work to hide them by default (which Apple did anyways, because Apple). With iOS 11 search controllers can integrate directly into the navigation bar, and in that case the search bar will be collapsed by default.

Integrate directly? Like is there a magnifying glass icon or ANYTHING to make it discoverable? Or do I just have to guess I should scroll up in i.e. Settings? cough Thanks, Apple.

Settings uses this API, so whatever it's doing.
Post reply on HN