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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#191

Post by aczerepinski »

buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I think the biggest culprit is "tap targets", meaning that everything has to be bigger than your fingertip so that it's easy to select on a phone. It leads to crazy amounts of white space around everything. This ruined the presentation of tabular data on the internet, like stock financials or nba.com box scores. They're waaaaaaay harder to read than they were 10 years ago.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#192

Post by JohnFen »

novok wrote: post #188

The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that change you lose the ability to prec…

> The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized

And yet, several mobile apps I use routinely have found a way to make it work reasonably well. They use a slim line of a scrollbar to indicate where you are, and if you touch the scrollbar then a larger finger-friendly handle appears which can be used like a traditional scrollbar.

But I'm much more forgiving of UI compromises that are forced by the limitations of mobile devices. It's when those same compromises are used on the desktop that I have a problem -- that's just degrading the UX for no good reason.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#193

Post by Miraste »

jandrese wrote: post #160
eropple wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).

I pull down the History menu reasonably often. I'm one of the few people who still uses bookmarks too. I found that hitting alt was annoying and I'd forget about the menu and try to find stuff on the Hamburger menu instead and get annoyed.

Maybe you know this already, but Firefox has shortcuts for both of those. History is Ctrl+H and bookmarks is Ctrl+B. Ctrl+Shift+H and Ctrl+Shift+B to get them in a separate window.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#194

Post by wott »

city41 wrote: post #37
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

I can't see the hamburger menu.

But here is the upper part of what I can see: https://imgur.com/eRFnDo6

Isn't is beautiful? How the image layer is put over half of the text line?

Oh, and the right part (white background) only appears after a couple of seconds. At first it shows the continuation of the blue background scree, with 2 'menu' items: "Se connecter" (log in) and "S'inscrire" (sign in). So if you try to click on "sign in", by the time your click is registered, it ends up on the white background item which appears at the same place: "Télécharger" (download).

Wonderful.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#195

Post by 0xffff2 »

novok wrote: post #188

The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that change you lose the ability to prec…

Scrollbars as a passive visual indicator are still extremely useful though.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#196

Post by Miraste »

JohnFen wrote: post #187
jonhohle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always

Which system/application is this for? Unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible) it doesn't map to anything I use.

It's a MacOS system-wide setting.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#197

Post by dredmorbius »

JohnFen wrote: post #190
dredmorbius wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is extremely conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, longer than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the opti…

> A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.

Agreed.

As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback:

[I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...

(HN-safe archive link.)

The bulk of present UI/UX metaphors can be traced directly to the Mother of All Demos, now over fifty years old:

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

That said: from MoAD onward, the use-case has been of a desktop (or very-desktop-like laptop) system, with keyboard, pointer (mouse, tablet, light pen, etc.), used at something vaguely resembling a desk or table.

It's not even the screen size of mobile devices in raw resolution that's so different -- early GUI computers had as little as 640x480 (VGA) resolution or less. The original iPad was 1024x768.

But no keyboard, and finger-on-glass manipulation, call for a very different set of control and design considerations. A mouse pointer can have pixel-accuracy control. Fingers cover a probabalistic smear of screen space tens of pixels across and hide the screen elements they're affecting at the same time.

(And that's before you introduce such joys as screens repainting and repositioning as / before you complete a touch action.)

The real question is how to achieve concensus for new design and to void bad entrenched patterns across a highly fragmented design industry. Ranty flipping blog posts are one possible solution....

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#198

Post by jiveturkey »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

I actually prefer the current scollbar situation. I HATE when people hijack it but I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. I can always scroll a tiny amount (magic mouse) to see my progress. I really do like the clearer look to UI's without the bar. > No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is. > No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post. I've literally never had either…

TFA is about scrollbars on mobile.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#199

Post by novok »

JohnFen wrote: post #192
novok wrote: post #188

The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that change you lose the ability to prec…

> The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized And yet, several mobile apps I use routinely have found a way to make it work reasonably well. They use a slim line of a scrollbar to indicate where you are, and if you touch the scrollbar then a larger finger-friendly handle appears which can be use…

Testing on my iOS device, I don't think it's an app thing, but UIKit standard thing that comes with scrollviews. The bar doesn't become finger thick, but it's still usable. I've been using iOS devices for a long time, so it shows you how hidden it is.

I agree it's sloppy on desktops, but it helps to understand the reasons why the sloppyness happens. Kind of like electron apps :p

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#200

Post by JohnFen »

jaredwiener wrote: post #49
flyinghamster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar. My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

Agree! "Mobile First" design thinking should not mean "Mobile Only." What was supposed to be a call to consider all of the devices your users may be utilizing, it just transferred the preference from one type of device to another. Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?

> Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?

Indeed. There seems to be a weird idea that it's possible to make a UI that works well on all form factors. I don't see how that's possible, and I've never seen it happen in practice.

What actually happens is that you have a UI that works well on one form factor and badly on the others, or you have a UI that works poorly on them all.

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