Scrollbar Blindness • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#271

Post by liujy » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

richiebful1 wrote: post #212

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…

The problem is that the UI testing monoculture is on Safari. Safari has 20% market share according to StatCounter (9% desktop market share). Most users use Chrome on desktop and mobile.

My understanding is that the monoculture being discussed is macOS rather than Safari. I would be surprised if most developers tested UI primarily on Safari considering, like you said, most people are Chrome users.

Anecdotally, most engineers I know use Chrome on a MacBook. The only people I know who use Safari are my parents.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#272

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #228

tiborsaas wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our company offered me a choice between a Mac and a PC, but also said that the former is heavily recommended so I picked that option. I didn't want to be the guy who constantly cries for help because stuff is just not designed and never tested on windows.

Don't forget the constant peer pressure and lame jokes from your coworkers! Oh and if you're a Mac newbie, be prepared to figure it out for yourself. Not that people are unhelpful but that they genuinely don't know any other workflows beyond their cloistered little OS with a barely-usable kernel.

Perhaps they aren't particularly font of you calling their OS unusable.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#273

Post by seba_dos1 » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #251

mixmastamyk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.

The UIs of the OSes designed in the 640x480 era used 8pt system fonts, and were very careful about "spending" vertical space. The UIs of the OSes of today are not optimized for the same scenarios. Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern…

What you're showing here is lack of high DPI scaling and it's a completely different issue irrelevant to the GP's point - it's caused by increased pixel density, not screen space (unless your example comes from some 40" monitor or so). To make an honest comparison you would have to set the output resolution to a lower value.

When done right, increasing screen density doesn't really affect available space, just makes everything sharper (unless you manually reconfigure it to get more space, like I do on my hidpi laptop).

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#274

Post by abruzzi » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

this is my most hated Apple "UI modernization." Its not just a problem with website, apps, even Apple apps don't deal with it well. I always turn on scroll bars all the time (I do a lot of work with very long documents or files, and just scrolling with the scroll wheels doesn't cut it for these), and every time I do a VNC connection using the built in screen sharing app, the scroll bars are placed in the remote screen area, rather than outside it. So every time I connect to a remote screen, the first thing I have to do is enlarge the window so I can see everything.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#275

Post by arrayjumper » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #181

xur17 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To suggest that “bug wise“ it is the same between Mac and Linux is a bit of a stretch. I work in a team where the developers are mostly split between Mac and Ubuntu. Guess which ones often have problems joining zoom meetings or attaching their machines to a projector for a presentation? There are a lot of things that you generally don’t have to worry about much if you’re using a Mac. I’m not gonna say that one of the…

> Guess which ones often have problems joining zoom meetings

As a linux user, I'd like to say that I've seen that happen just as often with OSX users on my team. I think that's just Zoom's shitty app. But I do agree about peripheral hardware issues plaguing Linux. Bluetooth headphones are still such a hassle on Ubuntu 20.04.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#276

Post by devmunchies » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

spectramax wrote: post #74

Designers don’t get it. What do they teach in design schools these days? Genuine question. I hope stuff like this is brought up? How do you even become a UI designer?

I took a "designing the user experience" class in as part of my computer science curriculum (not in the design or art school).

It was much more rigorous than other design content I watch (e.g. skillshare, youtube), which are usually based on how something looks (emotion) and not the actual efficiency or usefulness of the design.

In the industry we really should distinguish between UI Architects and Aesthetic Designers.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#277

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #226

snazz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those kinds of pages are janky on macOS with a low-sensitivity scroll wheel too. They're really satisfying on touchscreens and touchpads; I wonder if it's possible to make them smooth on devices with junky mice without implementing the equally-annoying smooth scroll hijacking that is popular on some sites.

I guess you would just have to "smooth" out the animations also.

Yeah, and that frequently feels very wrong :(

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#278

Post by SebastianKra » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #163

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…

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

This has been changed in most iOS 14 Apps. (I checked Mail, Notes, Files and Reminders. The Settings-App still hides it)

It's a leftover from when iPhone screens where much smaller: https://postimg.cc/WFdqPwfd

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#279

Post by bradstewart » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #170

bradstewart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Despite my efforts to consider that people have different preferences for almost everything in life, I am constantly surprised by my assumumptions about how other people do things that turn out to be very wrong. It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wron…

I wonder if you’re suffering from past experiences of touch pads from the 1990s? I was a slow adopter for similar reasons. Remind yourself that it works exactly like the screen of an iPhone or iPad, that’s when it clicked for me.

Modern touchpads are significantly improved compared to the old generations (even from 5 years ago). It's not that touchpads are bad input devices (like they used to be), it's that I'm bad at touchpads.

I could probably get used to them if I had any reason to, but I have no idea where I would even put my laptop to use it comfortably with an external monitor. I like my mouse and I have no problems with it, so no sense in buying an external touchpad.

If I did a lot of work like scrubbing through audio/video or something that benefited from multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom, then maybe I'd consider it.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#280

Post by chrismorgan » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

Strongly related: viewport units (vw, vh, vmin, vmax) are fundamentally and irreconcilably broken if your document has scrollbars, because they include the size of document scrollbars, so that 100vw is equal to 100% + 17px if you have a 17px wide scrollbar there (the most likely value on Windows), so now all of a sudden you have a horizontal scrollbar too. Or your nicely calculated layout that thought that 33vw + 33vw + 33vw was true).

We need a new set of units that excludes document scrollbars. Or a constant like env(scrollbar-width) that represents the scrollbar width so that you can subtract it yourself, which would be useful in a few other places as well (instead I’ve done the likes of `var(--scrollbar-width, 20px)` and calculate and define --scrollbar-width on the root element in JavaScript).