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The Scroll Up Bar

usabilitypost.com

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41–50 of 118 posts

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#41

Post by badman_ting »

pfalke wrote: post #2

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/issue…

Mobile web moves too quickly to care about what was true 2 entire years ago :) iOS got position: fixed a couple versions back, and iOS users upgrade rapidly.

So, the advice not to use position: fixed on mobile may still be good, but iOS isn't the reason why.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#42

Post by masterleep »

Fixed bars are annoying and should rarely be used. But what's even worse is when the mobile version helpfully removes the content or feature that you'd like to see.

Please just have one site, make it efficient, and be done with it.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#43

Post by SilasX »

jasontsui wrote: post #30

Fun pattern, but is it more useful ? I think its hyperbolic to call losing 160px of reading space on top of a desktop browser a "nightmare". Something a user can see all the time has greater affordances than something that is hidden. Especially if that something is as essential as navigation. Honestly, I think this is more style than usability.

Yes, losing 25% of the already-scarce vertical space is a nightmare, to the extent that UX can be a nightmare. Plus, I've seen sites where the nav bar locks the URL bar in position and keeps me unable to scroll away from it, making it more like 50%. It's like I'm looking at the site through blinds!

And it's all for functionality I'm not even going to use!

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#44

Post by badman_ting »

JamisonM wrote: post #6

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…

Seriously? Pretty sure this has been in iPhone Safari since 1.0 (tap top bar to scroll to top), or at least as long as I can remember. I realize other browsers/platforms may not have this but that's a pretty big one to leave out...

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#46

Post by dang »

We reverted the title. The submitted title was "Fixed bars are becoming a new nightmare on mobile".

The HN guidelines ask you not to rewrite titles. Especially please do not rewrite them to make them more controversial.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#47

Post by leorocky »

EC1 wrote: post #38
Aardwolf wrote: post #23

Am I the only one who prefers to read websites in "desktop" mode? I always feel totally alienated by the mobile page, there is information left out, annoying badly-implemented JS scrollers, etc... The "desktop" site looks always more nice and familiar, and you can zoom and scroll around as you wish to read everything.

Mobile sites should ONLY serve you text for an article. I don't understand how people don't understand this when created UI/UX for products.

Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck.

I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really needs to make a larger screen phone because that tiny thing isn't competitive, but I'm a very big person with big hands and big pockets. The S5 is also a very good phone, the plastic casing is weird, but I just put it in a really nice case and I never even notice the cheap materials the thing is made with.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#48

Post by tambourmajor »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #22

What's worse is some sites that do this can't seem to differentiate between iPads and iPhones and seem to use percentages everywhere in their CSS. As a result, you get a huge header (which feels larger in landscape orientation).

Another big annoyance is when the mobile mode is solely based on the user agent string and there is no way to deactivate it other than changing the user agent (for example Google Search). It’s almost as if no Google employee has a tablet device. I would be genuinely interested in seeing behind the curtains of decisions like this one.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#49

Post by vxNsr »

FIxed bars and JS pop-ups are the window pop-ups of the 90's and really I'm just waiting for someone to make a chrome extension that takes care of 'em in the same way.

The only real issue is that mobile browsers don't allow extensions of any kind (at least the ones I've used don't). So there is no real way to add such customizations to mobile browsers, and we're left hoping they go mainstream enough that someone either creates a browser around that feature (ie useragent switch, which is kind of annoying to use because it means copying the url and switching apps), or a dev in a mainstream browser makes it their weekend project. Neither one of these options is ideal, in the first you're left with a bunch of browsers that do one thing, in the latter you're going to end up with a feature that will slowly stop working as the dev's main work builds and his manager tells him to drop it.

Re: The Scroll Up Bar

#50

Post by EC1 »

leorocky wrote: post #47
EC1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile sites should ONLY serve you text for an article. I don't understand how people don't understand this when created UI/UX for products.

Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck. I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really…

It's real easy.

[text] [image on new line, click to open in new window] [text continuation]

I don't think the iPhone is too small at all. In comparison to others, yes, but standalone, I don't think so. I use pocket for reading anyways since all my articles are centralized.

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