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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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141–150 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#141

Post by reidjs »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #135
x87678r wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outside of your country ... most people do not have a Mac, I think you mean outside of the Bay Area. For PCs/Desktop Apple has like 12% market share in the US. 7% globally.

People in this bubble overestimate the popularity of anything Apple. I once had a discussion with a coworker at a major company known for its app, where I was complaining about an Android bug and he genuinely asked "does anybody even use Android?" And I responded, "only the majority of users in every country around the world including the US. It's even 50/50 on our app!" Afterward, I found the internal numbers for em…

Users or customers? Is it possible more revenue was coming from iOS users?

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#142

Post by scaryclam »

umvi wrote: post #19

Wow, that's pretty bad. I'm guessing the front end developers of those sites just do everything on a Mac and never check how the site looks on Windows or Linux.

Even worse, they tend just do it just on Mac and only in Chrome.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#143

Post by liminal »

Hidden scrollbars are just terrible UX all round for so many reasons:

- Discoverability: You don't even know if a container is scrollable at all until you try.

- Orientation: You don't know where you are in a document until you scroll to make the bar appear, and then you have to notice it before it disappears

- Usability: It's much harder to target the scroll thumb to drag it. To find it you need to again scroll first, then notice it, then target it with the mouse, all under time pressure before it disappears.

If you're on MacOS, do yourself (and your users) a favor and set them to always show.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#144

Post by madeofpalk »

vbsteven wrote: post #102
jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

I think the macOS monoculture is going to go away in the next few years because on one side macOS is becoming more and more developer hostile with each release and on the other side WSL (and WSL2) is improving the Windows developer experience a lot. I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.

As always, it's all about the tooling. For better or worse, more is moving to web/electron, but for teams using Sketch, good luck trying to open Sketch file on Windows.

After getting a Windows gaming PC, I've been spending more and more of my time, developing and otherwise, on PC. I prefer it because it's where I have my large (low DPI :( ) monitor, but Windows is still full of so many papercuts in general usage (I miss being able to drag a file into a Open File dialog so much) that I still greatly prefer using macOS.

Windows has some niceties to try and make the transition better - The Windows Terminal app is pheonomial, and Powershell tries to map rm to whatever the Powershell command is - rm -rf doesnt work as expected though. I honestly don't find myself using WSL all that much - I only use it when I can't figure out how to make ping go forever in Powershell.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#145

Post by tfvlrue »

missblit wrote: post #101
dusted wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, that's pretty terrible, I always scroll with the mouse wheel, since I'm tool old to be rubbing a plate of glass and not feel like a moron. But this one, made my finger hurt a bit and I din't even make it half way down.

I have a "Mitsumi Standard Scroll" mouse that has a scroll button that you can hold down instead of a wheel that you have to keep spinning. It's so much easier on the fingers that I'm amazed I haven't been able to find it anywhere else.

Maybe not quite the same, but many Logitech gaming mice have scroll up/down buttons above and below the mouse wheel. The MX518, for example.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#146

Post by pacifika »

ManskY wrote: post #116
supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge. There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

Removing elements from a design to achieve clarity is a workaround for being unable to clarify the design itself.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#147

Post by newsbinator »

x87678r wrote: post #126
newsbinator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full stack dev, 8 ~ 12 hours a day on my 2015 MBP 13" touchpad. No regrets.

using laptop screen? How is your posture?

Absurdly bad, I'll admit. But after 15+ years of this, still no noticeable problems.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#148

Post by ZeWaren »

I use an old IBM laptop with only a pointing stick (the red nipple in the middle of the keyboard).

I don't mind having to move my mouse to the scrollbar and drag it to scroll documents or webpages (when I can't use the keyboard for that already).

This was fine until a few years ago when scrollbars starting to hide or become super thin. I should not have to concentrate to be able to target scrollbars with my cursor.

If you're working on UX/UI design, please remember that not everyone has or uses a scrollwheel on their mice.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#149

Post by bobbyT314 »

The_rationalist wrote: post #112
soco wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar... As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.

It's not just about 1% of screenspace, it's about visual pollution that is distracting, it increase cognitive noise and cognitive noise is cancer

Giving the user clear feedback about where they are in a page and how to modify their location should not "increase cognitive noise". It should in fact offload cognitive load from the user onto the interface leaving more room, so to speak, for the user to use for themselves.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#150

Post by leonidasv »

xur17 wrote: post #108
vbsteven wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the macOS monoculture is going to go away in the next few years because on one side macOS is becoming more and more developer hostile with each release and on the other side WSL (and WSL2) is improving the Windows developer experience a lot. I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.

For folks considering the switch, I highly recommend considering linux as well. I've used both macOS and ubuntu as a development environment, and bug wise they are on par, but linux really excels at having a true "native" development environment. Docker without a weird VM, true bash, etc.

Just a minor nitpick, macOS has true bash. It just doesn't have the GNU coreutils, instead it uses the BSD-based equivalents.

And yeah, they suck a lot[1], but there's a way to fix if you use Homebrew: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57973942/8280773

[1] Performance-wise and also when you take into account that most shell scripts/tutorials on the internet are written with a GNU userland in mind.

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