The Scroll Up Bar

#1

Post by muloka » Mon, May 26, 2014, 1:42 PM UTC

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#2

Post by pfalke » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

Worse than taking up screen space, these bars often exhibit laggy scrolling behavior and cause other UI bugs. There are very few well working implementations of such fixed bars, partly due to difficulties like the position:fixed implementation in Mobile Safari[0] - unless that has been changed in iOS7.

I highly recommend to refrain from using position:fixed on mobile devices.

[0] http://remysharp.com/2012/05/24/issues-with-position-fixed-s...

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#3

Post by lnanek2 » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

I was all ready to complain that I want some sort of nav/menu thing always stuck at the top, but I'm actually OK with the solution presented where it just shows as soon as you scroll up without having to scroll all the way.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#4

Post by jasonkostempski » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:36 PM UTC

I don't know if Android has the feature where you just tap the status bar to scroll to top but iOS does. With that feature I'd rather nav bars just stay at the top of the page, I'll just tap the status bar if I need to get back up there, which is almost never anyway.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#5

Post by dmalik » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

I was hoping to read about a usability study done when I clicked the link. I do agree for blogs and articles but for web apps I'm not sold.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#6

Post by JamisonM » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:39 PM UTC

The thing about this is that there is, as far as I can tell, no good solution for the fact that it can take a long, long time to return to the top of a page with a lot of text on a mobile device. If I read 3/4 of a lengthy story on my phone and I want to navigate somewhere else on the same website my only practical option is to revisit the main page of the site and start navigating from there.

Do any mobile browsers have a "return to top of page" function? My keyboard has a "Home" key, my phone does not.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#7

Post by lobo_tuerto » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:39 PM UTC

The solution presented there is the same used by Google Chrome on Android, it might surprise a totally new user, but one gets used to it pretty fast. Seems like it's the best solution all around.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#8

Post by jrajav » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #3

I was all ready to complain that I want some sort of nav/menu thing always stuck at the top, but I'm actually OK with the solution presented where it just shows as soon as you scroll up without having to scroll all the way.

This is exactly how Chrome for Android works with its toolbar and I think it works very nicely.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#9

Post by jrajav » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

jasonkostempski wrote: post #4

I don't know if Android has the feature where you just tap the status bar to scroll to top but iOS does. With that feature I'd rather nav bars just stay at the top of the page, I'll just tap the status bar if I need to get back up there, which is almost never anyway.

Android doesn't have that by default, you need an app for it, and I'm pretty sure you also need to be rooted. Definitely not something you can depend on users having.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#10

Post by dj-wonk » Mon, May 26, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

"Creeper" nav bars (an appropriate term, I think) are partly a consequence of mobile devices not letting you instantly jump to the top of a page. Mobile devices should offer a snappy, intuitive way to jump to the top or bottom of a page.