> blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland.
you make it sound as if FOSS GUI toolkits ever had a pleasant user experience.
Scrollbars are becoming a problem
131–140 of 944 posts
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#132Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst. The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
Also, kudos for the extended family of extension writers. The article author ends on praise for minimap sidebars as an upgrade over conventional scrollbars, and what do you know, there's something for that:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimap-scrol...
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#133I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point.
The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white".
**
That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#134Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#135It's not just scrollbars.
It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.
It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window.
It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all.
It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless.
It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.
Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.
The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#136I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
How old are you? I bet you a pound you're 40, or thereabouts. Trust me, your eyesight is becoming worse...
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#137Regarding minimaps: I thought, these were great, too, but then I discovered that I find them rather irritating and that I actually don't use them. I guess, this is, because you have to maintain a mental mapping of that document and how it is organized, already, for the minimap to make sense. But, then, referring to that visual mapping of what you're already mapping in a much more abstract sense, seems – at least for me – to be rather adding friction than being helpful.
The scrollbar, being both highly abstract and visceral/tangible at the same time, is hard to beat.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#138Worse is when UI designers intentionally put a delay to scrolling to give it an elastic band feeling. Bro I just want to scroll down, not wait 400 milliseconds for your stupid thing to respond. Why can't they just minimize latency and make things intuitive. No rows of indecipherable icons that we are forced to memorize. No having to hover our mouse over each icon and waiting 1.5 seconds for the text to explain what it is that each icon is doing. Put plain text there, or make it so the tooltip immediately displays. We are people, we use 10s of pieces of software, we can't memorize 10*10 different icons.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article specifically mentions eye tracker users as an affected group. Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking). Unfortunately the article doesn't mentio…
> because they're not really meant to be used that way ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
> ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
With the page up and page down keys, mostly, though you could drag the scrollbar.
Not sure about Word, but I believe many apps had a keyboard + mouse combination that enabled scrolling with any mouse movement without interacting with the scollbar, as well.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#140I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
How old are you? I bet you a pound you're 40, or thereabouts. Trust me, your eyesight is becoming worse...
I got a downvote. OK, let's upgrade that to 2 pounds ;)
(Of course, that was a lot of money when we were both young...)