Reinvent everything. Break the rules. Be better. Explore. Fail. Explore until you're so far out in left field, everyone every where else is looking to you to lead them.
Don't reinvent the scrollbar
61–70 of 172 posts
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well from a UX perspective, it was a great write-up.
Thank you! As my first blog post, this is quite encouraging haha
"But Ben!" - Not to be discouraging, the "natural flow" is a fair point in your article, but genereally it feels highly arrogant.
Some experiments may go wrong, and it is ok that you point that out, but telling them not to reinvent anything is another thing.
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#63Two assumptions:
* horizontal progress for vertical content is bad
* infinite scroll is better than pages/tabs/whatever
Just saying "poor natural mapping" doesn't mean horizontal progress is wrong and just saying "why would you" doesn't make pages wrong.
I'd like to see data to support those assumptions. On infinite scroll I'd bet horizontal progress has minuscule negative impact on usability vs vertical progress. On paged I bet it performs just as well.
And regarding pages vs infinite scroll, I bet pages actually perform much better. Infinite scroll is elegant for us, the developers, but for users it presents a dramatic increase in cognitive load to constantly be orienting yourself in this infinite space with hints of often unrelated content above and below. With lots of content, infinite scroll actually encourages people to scroll which is usually the last thing you actually should do. If the primary means of navigation is via a navigation menu (aka the content needs to be organized, not an article), then why the hell would you dump all the output into one giant bucket of content?
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Not to put to fine a point on it, but if your user is on iOS or OS X, they are accustomed to losing sight of their progress because, as the article says, "Apple knows best." Going out of your way as a content author to correct for the user interface quirks of the reader's preferred reading environment seems extraordinary and unnecessary. Presumably a non-trivial number of iOS and OS X users actually like the…
It's my preferred reading environment, but I hate that apple made this decision, because, as my sibling commenter here noted, it's outright user hostile. Apple never really totally understood the "visibility" requirement of usable interfaces. They like to hide things to make them look pretty, and it only leads to better advertising, not better interfaces. Thankfully there's still a setting to always show scrollbars.…
I guess it comes down to personal taste. I for one like that they hide away, and I can bring them back just by holding down for two fingers on my trackpad.
Thankfully you can make scroll bars persistent in System Preferences.
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#65Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#66I was nodding along, when suddenly... > One alternative is to ignore iOS and OS X users. But that’s not very nice. There are many scrolling libraries available that you can use, such as NiceScroll. > Or you can just make your own indicator like the one seen at the very start of the article. Just don’t use a horizontal indicator for vertical progression :) No! Do not do this. Just stop. Stop reinventing and reimplemen…
Agreed. Not to put to fine a point on it, but if your user is on iOS or OS X, they are accustomed to losing sight of their progress because, as the article says, "Apple knows best." Going out of your way as a content author to correct for the user interface quirks of the reader's preferred reading environment seems extraordinary and unnecessary. Presumably a non-trivial number of iOS and OS X users actually like the…
I like having the scrollbars hidden. If I want to see my progress, I just put two fingers on my trackpad.
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#67I was nodding along, when suddenly... > One alternative is to ignore iOS and OS X users. But that’s not very nice. There are many scrolling libraries available that you can use, such as NiceScroll. > Or you can just make your own indicator like the one seen at the very start of the article. Just don’t use a horizontal indicator for vertical progression :) No! Do not do this. Just stop. Stop reinventing and reimplemen…
Completely agree. I constantly have this fight with designers, disappearing scrollbars may not be (and I don't think it is) the best experience, but it is the system experience. It's far easier to explain to a casual user that on OS X you have to touch the trackpad to see the scroll position in all apps rather then "except that app that uses its own scrollbars that don't quite work right".
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#68You think that's bad? Gnome 3 removed single line scrolling by removing the up and down arrows "because nobody would need that".
Unity is even worse, with its overlay scrollbars.
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#69I don't know... Reinventing the scrollbar can be fun: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-introducing-th...
Re: Don't reinvent the scrollbar
#70Careful not to read this too fast: I thought it was criticizing http://ricostacruz.com/nprogress/ but it's not.
Yeah I went a little too fast myself and so, started reading the comments because I was confused. I thought the loading progress bar was actually a good thing and a UX improvement when waiting for heavy pages to load.
Regarding using such a bar as an indicator of page-scroll progress, I'm indifferent. It's not intrusive, so if I don't care for it, it doesn't bother me. For those who do care for it, I think the horizontal positioning is easier to gauge page-scroll progress because looking up is easier than looking all the way over to the right of my viewport (I never look over there because I use a scroll-wheel or touchpad to do the scrolling ;)