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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#621

Post by bigstrat2003 »

tom_ wrote: post #123
ryokeken wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

duuuuuude for real a11y? what kind of weird lingo flex is that?

It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility", along the same lines of i18n being an abbreviation for internationalisation. There's the first letter, and the last letter, and between them a count of the number of letters elidded.

It's really uncommon to see, I wouldn't call it "long-standing" at all. It's really obscure jargon that even most technical people don't know. At least "i18n" is widespread enough that most people will see it, though that's stupid too because it's incredibly unclear. I had no idea what it meant until this year despite having seen it for a decade or more.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#622

Post by MenhirMike »

mort96 wrote: post #522
MenhirMike wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.

I won't argue against Windows 2000's usability. But I will say that to me, as someone who first started using computers in the XP era, any Windows earlier than Windows 7 looks so god damn ugly to me, and Windows 2000 even more so than XP. Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.

To me, XP and Vista looked like a terrible attempt at replicating Mac OS X when that all wow'ed us - it's hard to imagine these days just how big of a deal the iMac and later on OS X were in terms of moving away from grey boxes everywhere (though sometimes too far, since Windows 7 really toned down and refined XP/Vista's UI).

For me, I grew up on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and MS-DOS, so Windows NT/2000 felt like a good evolution from it's User Interface. Very functional, for sure.

100% agree on Classic MacOS. As outdated as the tech was, it was beautiful because it was elegant without being distracting.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#623

Post by hoosieree »

Maybe scrolling itself is the real problem, and bad scrollbar design is just a symptom. Think of how long it took you to get to this comment, and all the other things you could have been doing with your life. Was it worth it?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#624

Post by itslennysfault »

Not sure why anyone wants scrollbars. On Mac they're pretty much universally hidden until you start scrolling. I never use them and hardly notice them which is great. I only scroll with 2 fingers on the track pad. I'm always shocked when I see people interact with a scroll bar directly using the mouse.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#625

Post by bigstrat2003 »

regularfry wrote: post #473
jacobgorm wrote: post #457

I agree the scrollbar is dying and becoming unusable. A scroll bar needs to be: - Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit. - Proportional sized, indicating how much of the document is currently in view. - Movable parts should have features indicating friction, as opposed to slippy-ness. - With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends. - It should change colors to indicate hover and mouse press. Of the…

All of this, with the addition that you should have the option of panning in both dimensions from a single toolbar widget if the document supports it. I've seen that implemented but never with the arrow buttons together rather than at opposite ends. > - Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit. Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things…

> Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things like Fitt's Law...

Which, despite the name, is not a law and should not be called such. I've had so many people claim that I'm wrong for disliking the global menu in MacOS because "Fitt's Law" says it's better. And yet, it's still less usable for me despite the claim that this "law" makes or what Apple's defenders say.

If people's subjective preference can be contrary to what Fitt observed, then it's not a law. A law is something that is true for everyone, it is not a matter of opinion. I have no doubt that this is a useful maxim, but it's not a law and I really wish it wasn't named so poorly.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#626

Post by aidenn0 »

I hate most auto-hide scrollbars. Something I didn't see mentioned in TFA was the fact that I mostly use scrollbars as a read-only tool; sure they are good for the occasional scrubbing through content, but mostly I scroll with the keyboard or scroll-wheel.

Glancing to the side and seeing both how much scrolling there is (by the size of the scrollbar grab target[1]) and how much space I have to go (by the position of the scrollbar grab target is something I use all the freaking time.

1: This is a relatively modern feature. The first decade or so of me using scrollbars they were a fixed size)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#627

Post by hotnfresh »

jiggawatts wrote: post #369
hotnfresh wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of azure’s a web UI is a disaster. Breadcrumbs that aren’t really breadcrumbs. “X” that sometimes means back and sometimes means several steps back. … and the browser back button sometimes does what you expect, and sometimes not. “X” stacked directly under one of the aforementioned “X”s, which means close, but the other “X” is back, all on a flat ui with the same background and no border. And yeah, the log analyt…

I still prefer it over AWS, which has separate portals for each product in each region. All of which show random internal identifiers instead of human-readable text. None of which support a folder structure, a technology invented before the advent of computers.

Every cloud “dashboard” is total shit (there are whole businesses that do nothing but provide a better UI for them, that’s how bad they are) but AWS does indeed take the prize for worst.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#628

Post by docmars »

butz wrote: post #603

Looking from web browser perspective, scrollbar should be part of browser UI ("chrome" if you will), but not webpage. Sure, some designers love that they can customize colors of scrollbar and change its width, but it's a huge accessibility problem, even for people without disabilities. And when clicking on scrollbar counts as interaction with website and starts autoplaying video somewhere in the background, you know…

I agree mostly; one of the tricky areas is pages with split layout containers that are individually scrollable, where it doesn't make sense to use the page/body level scrollbar to control that content. Another common case are smaller widgets or modules that have their own scrolling context.

The other half of the issue is that native scrollbars, especially on Windows, are a huge eyesore in those scenarios because they disrupt the layout or conflict heavily with the app or site's branding in some way. Take any eyesore in real life and it produces the same psychological effect — scrollbars too often feel like they don't belong.

Of course, many here (and myself) would argue that usability is far more important than branding.

I think a happy medium would be to enforce a certain size and stay with fundamental usability principles, while allowing customization of colors / arrow images at most, probably.

A good, usability-focused designer alongside their engineers would keep these things in mind, ideally, but alas — a great many experiences are driven by amateur-level professionals who are still learning about these blind spots, and favor aesthetics over functionality.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#629

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

* Thankfully, Firefox is at least fixable (for now…), Here, I set the size to 50. I don’t want it this big myself but by goly am I glad I can make it this big anyway.*

Only 50? I can finally have something useful to fill that massive blank space between my content and the edge of the page.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#630

Post by JohnFen »

CRConrad wrote: post #585
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…

> Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. "Informs"?!? Deforms! WTF does phone usage have to do with sabotaging the UI on a computer???

Because designers and devs don't want to have to do multiple designs. Everyone's aiming for one design that works for everything. The problem is that such a thing is impossible.
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