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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#261

Post by baggy_trough »

Klathmon wrote: post #217
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows... So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I wo…

Horrific.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#262

Post by NorwegianDude »

Filligree wrote: post #139
x87678r wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux on laptops is getting much better too. Is a great alternative now for developers.

So long as you don't need HiDPI, multi-gpu or good touch-pad support.

High density hasn't been an issue for me lately on Ubuntu, I rarely use a touchpad, so I can't comment on that. GPU support is absolutely garbage on Mac OS in comparison, both from a compatability and performance perspective.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#263

Post by mike22 »

Tagbert wrote: post #41
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.

You can also tap the space bar to scroll a screen at a time

This is broken with floating headers and footers. The scrolling goes over the whole viewport; after each pg dn-equivalent, you need to scroll back up two or three lines to see what was covered by the header/footer.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#264

Post by kps »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #174
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…

Another thing I keep bumping into is designers assuming a nice 16:10 display, and wondering why when the final product is opened up on a 1366x768 shitbox barely any actual content is visible.

… designers assuming they have my whole screen.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#265

Post by thirdtry »

frereubu wrote: post #190
derefr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling. Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than deskto…

I think you're comparing apples and pears when you talk about Maps. There's a clear use case for scrollbars on vertical documents (i.e. most of them), and even when viewing something in an infinite scroll, so you know where you are when scrolling back up. (Although don't get me started on the UX of infinite scrolling!) Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing…

I got bit by infinite scrolling yesterday. I liked an article, clicked in the URL, copied and pasted it into a group chat with my team... and then noticed it was the wrong URL. The fine website had "helpfully" autoscrolled a smidge into the next article, so it updated the URL box to the next article. Lesson learned-- read before pasting...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#266

Post by jrochkind1 »

bb123 wrote: post #23
untog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even understand why they would remove them? Who ever complained of a scroll bar? IMO it's all part of this push to combine mobile and desktop UI. On mobile there is a legitimate case to be made for removing them because screen real estate is so precious. But desktop gets clobbered as an unwanted side effect.

I actually think it has more to do with the increasing size and sophistication of the touchpad in Macs. There is no need for a scroll bar when you have a touchpad you can flick (likewise for magic mice).

The touchpad is related to mobile too though; trying to close the gap between computer interface and mobile touch interfaces. I don't think we'd have a touchpad if we didn't have mobile touchscreens first. And recall how Apple switched the "scroll direction" on the touchpad so you move your fingers in the same manner as you would directly on a screen to produce a given scroll direction.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#267

Post by chrismorgan »

I have noticed this too. This page itself immediately distressed me with its deliberate overdone use of `overflow: scroll`, so much so that I honestly almost left it without reading, which seems a little weird when I reflect on it, but… ugh, multiple useless scrollbars. I think this must be what people mean when they describe something “triggering” them.

I think there are two parts to the problem: ① a popular developer platform using overlay scrollbars; and ② the fact that `overflow: scroll` sounds like what people want, when it’s actually not (as you say, they wanted `overflow: auto`). If I could rewrite the history of just this one property, I’d rename `scroll` to `always-show-scrollbar` or `show-scrollbar-even-if-insufficient-content-to-scroll` or similar. Or maybe split `overflow` in two and use `scrollbar-show: always;`.

Hmm. I wonder if we could convince browser makers to kill off `overflow: scroll`, making it equivalent to `overflow: auto` due to rampant abuse (there’s precedent for this sort of thing), and replace it with a new, more clearly-named property `scrollbar-show: always`. (And `scrollbar-{x,y,inline,block}-show` to go with it.) Maybe `always` wouldn’t be quite the right keyword, given that it wouldn’t be affecting the behaviour of platforms with overlay scrollbars. But this actually sounds both reasonable and feasible to me, given that `overflow: scroll` is subject to rampant abuse due to misunderstanding and was basically only a tiny quality of life thing for certain corner cases in layouts anyway.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#268

Post by NorwegianDude »

croes wrote: post #158
jfengel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a UX standpoint there's a big advantage to monoculture: the user learns a thing once and applies the idiom everywhere. For most users, diversity of options means having to learn every option. They'd rather have one good thing -- or even one good-enough thing. The world does have a variety of options, so users need to live with the fact that they're going to have to discover things, and designers are going to hav…

That monoculture means you can't change anything because it breaks the learned idioms. And there is no best possible UX. UX is mostly subjective measured.

Being incompetent and not knowing how overflow in CSS works is definetly something anyone should be able to change.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#269

Post by derefr »

thirdtry wrote: post #265
frereubu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're comparing apples and pears when you talk about Maps. There's a clear use case for scrollbars on vertical documents (i.e. most of them), and even when viewing something in an infinite scroll, so you know where you are when scrolling back up. (Although don't get me started on the UX of infinite scrolling!) Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing…

I got bit by infinite scrolling yesterday. I liked an article, clicked in the URL, copied and pasted it into a group chat with my team... and then noticed it was the wrong URL. The fine website had "helpfully" autoscrolled a smidge into the next article, so it updated the URL box to the next article. Lesson learned-- read before pasting...

You might resent the autoscroll on the website, but did you consider that the group chat program also has an infinite scroll, for chat history? Imagine what a hypothetical scrollbar for the group-chat program would look like if it had one, and if that scrollbar actually represented your relative position in a complete timeline going back to when the chat-group was created. :)
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