I noticed this a few years ago on a project I was working on, and ever since I've always enabled scroll bars on my work laptops.
More recently, a few weeks ago we had a bug in our app that was caused by an India time zone. Our company is fully U.S.-based so nobody noticed. Since then I've kept my computer in the India time zone so that time zone issues are readily apparent. I've already caught another one since then.
There's a more general principle here of "user empathy": configuring your environment so that you're in the same boat as your users.
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…
GUIs used to be discoverable and intuitive. Now they make bash and git look user friendly.
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.
Oh god. My phone has one of those - there's some sort of swipe gesture which puts it into a split-screen mode, which I have only ever invoked accidentally, and I have no idea how to get rid of it - none of my various guesses at possible anti-swipe actions have worked. When I pull my phone out of my pocket to discover that it has gotten into this state, I just reboot.
Try dragging the divider all the way to the top or bottom. This seems to work on my Android phone.
Another one of such thing: please try to scroll on your site using a mouse wheel from time to time, even if you're normally using a touchpad (from your laptop or an external one)! Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad. Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.
That's a great point, I would never have thought of that
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…
I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do just fine learning all these unique UI’s, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a loss of “general computing capability”, for lack of a better term?
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…
GUIs used to be discoverable and intuitive. Now they make bash and git look user friendly.
This somehow seems like a variation on Zawinski's Law. "Every UI evolves into something that makes its users confused, hesitant and angry", perhaps.
Ooo those hidden/slim scrollbars are annoying. It's as bad as an auto-hiding taskbar.
When I first saw it the first thing I did was to find a way to get rid of it. In Windows it's: Settings > Ease of Access > "Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows" > Off
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…
I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do j…
I know what you mean. I had so many experiences as a young person figuring out my own and others computer problems but just sort of knowing where to click, and how many times, or how many seconds to hold the button.. resetting the screen resolution with just the keyboard when you couldn't see anything, getting out of crashed full screen windows with "alt+space down M move the mouse"..
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…
I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do j…
A while ago I had a discussion about our UI with our designer, and when I mentioned that nothing seems to work as you’d expect, he said he wants people to learn a unique way of dealing with our interface.
It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.
30 here. On my iPad, if I bring up an app in the floating view, I often have to rediscover how to dismiss it. I just tried to do it now and this is how it went: My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar a…
I wish I knew how that floating window thing worked, cause like you I can manage to open it when I don't want it and can't get it to go away. I keep meaning to look for a good iPad tutorial, to see how to do all this stuff.
Remember the days of Scott Forestall, when iOS was famous for being intuitively and effectively used by three year olds?