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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#551

Post by kps »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #366
jorvi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it…

Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability. When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline? Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consi…

Old MacOS was good, until they started gradually making it phonelike. The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines¹ was solid work. (The big flaw, as usual, forced on the professionals from above: the form-over-function one-button mouse, requiring the undiscoverable double-click — it's almost forgotten now, but originally people had to be trained to double click ‘correctly’.)

¹ https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#552

Post by CRConrad »

Bad headline:

> But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem.

So it's not the scrollbars per se, but the fucking around with them that is the problem.

A) Wow, noticed that already? /s

B) Why just scrollbars? Fucking "front-end" designers are fucking around with everything!

C) I blame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868493

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#553

Post by kps »

bsder wrote: post #261
codalan wrote: post #135

It'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 wind…

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the bane that is "progressive scrolling". "No, we won't actually load the text at the bottom of the scollbar until you scroll down to it--and we'll only load it in a dribble." @#$%^&*()_+!

Breaks searching, too.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#555

Post by ajsnigrutin »

On one hand, no scrollbars, so when you're scrolling, you have no idea how far 'down' you are... on the other, 80% of the screen is filled with useless junk, ads, sidebars, app menu bars, search bars, address bars, status bars, side panels... but not enough space for a scrollbar.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#556

Post by bluGill »

jwrallie wrote: post #229
jchw wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades,…

I believe the biggest obstacle is dealing with different toolkits, since gtk3 and later are constantly breaking theme compatibility with new versions, and nobody have the time to maintain good alternative themes in these conditions. XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated. The problem is that important pieces of sof…

You can find well maintained applications for almost everything in either qt or gtk3. So you can select one toolkit to support. KDE might even accept your theme if you did enough work on it to make it work - and this is something that is feasible for one person. The hard part is those few exceptions, if you need one GTK3 app because KDE doesn't have a good alternative (or one qt app because GTK3 doesn't) then you have twice as much work and it is probably beyond what one person can do. Making that missing app for qt/gtk3 probably needs a large team and a few years and so is beyond you (unless you are rich and can afford to hire someone to fulfill your vision) - and there are many missing applications, not to mention existing ones which are just barely acceptable

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#558

Post by chankstein38 »

codalan wrote: post #135

It'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 wind…

This is common on sites like YouTube as well. Try to scroll through your front page without your mouse accidentally hitting random videos and causing them to auto play. It drives me insane. The best spot for the mouse that I've found is a small maybe 20px area between the menu bar and the leftmost video. Other than that, you're autoplaying something.

I agree with everything you said as well. Huge complaints from me over time. What if a Chrome window has fallen to the background behind another window and I want to grab it? Oops switched tabs because I can't get my mouse to stop in that little 10px area up top. Oof.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#559

Post by asoneth »

bluGill wrote: post #530
chefandy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have the…

Does anyone apply formal usability studies anymore? (not just do them - do they apply the results). I was trained in formal UX long ago, and many UIs today outright violate common rules we learned back then. High contrast was considered important for low vision users even if it looked ugly then. Now most UIs are lower contrast and while they look nicer, they are less usable. Of course I learned long ago and so I'm wi…

Formal usability testing is still practiced in enterprise, military, and professional products.

From what I've seen from colleagues in the consumer space they've predominantly switched to A/B testing and statistical clickstream/log analyses, though large companies sometimes still do run lab studies for important decisions and to rationalize the giant one-way mirror they installed.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#560

Post by williamcotton »

bluGill wrote: post #530
chefandy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have the…

Does anyone apply formal usability studies anymore? (not just do them - do they apply the results). I was trained in formal UX long ago, and many UIs today outright violate common rules we learned back then. High contrast was considered important for low vision users even if it looked ugly then. Now most UIs are lower contrast and while they look nicer, they are less usable. Of course I learned long ago and so I'm wi…

I go to the store to buy a hammer. I’m a hammer user and I use the hammer.

Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin.

These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin?

Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday.

I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI. The lawyers themselves highlighted and handled the contrast of the document. Beyond the table itself, Excel’s menu bar is easy to read for the basic operating needs of a spreadsheet. I mean come on, the pivot table UI is clearly masterful. (If Excel was a native plaintext tabular format and you could pipe stdin/out to the GUI app? Gimme!)

However, a lot of software is basically useless these days. It’s not designed from the beginning to be productive in any shape or form.

Some stoned dance by a junkie under a highway overpass is definitely some kind of expressive art form. How much more productive is the expressive art forms promoted by TikTok, Twitter or Twitch?

There’s clearly a scale at play. I’m as big fan of Twitch as much as I’m a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. I’ve always appreciated the sociological aspects of sports. To add some context to my definition of productivity, I would say that group sporting events are overall productive from a sociological perspective, be it IPL cricket or Fortnite tournaments.

TikTok is clearly and quite obviously towards the junkie dance scale of things.

From an experiential position there was not much of a difference between my observations of a woman filming herself doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world and the junky on the next block doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This basic object-level assessment of the actions that we and others experience with our physical bodies is core to the very notion of “meaning”. The “meaning” is just the stoned dance.

I know of no junkies famous for only being junkies but there are definitely TikTokers famous for only being TikTokers so don’t confuse this for some strict equivalence.

I’m just trying to establish a kind of framework for discussing the relationship between productive UI and productive software tools.

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