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Scrollbar Blindness

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#341

Post by Kalium »

shaan7 wrote: post #237
Kalium wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we may be seeing an organizational issue at work. The job of a design department is to produce design. If there isn't enough new stuff to design, they will redesign old stuff. This serves to advance the critical goal to the design department of justifying their continued existence. The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need…

Combine that with the needs of designers to "make the experience unique" to a level where consistency goes out of the window. Every commercial software these days has its own idea of design and it gets irritatingly hard to learn a new set of usage pattern for each. Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline…

I've seen devs do it while also ignoring an overloaded pipeline of work. Sometimes you manage to get the worst of both worlds.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#342

Post by ziml77 »

asciimov wrote: post #214
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. I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability. Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display i…

30 here. On my iPad, if I bring up an app in the floating view, I often have to rediscover how to dismiss it. I just tried to do it now and this is how it went:

My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar at the top and realized it was probably a drag handle. Grabbed that and tried to flick it downwards. No luck, but it moved in a way that made it seem like dragging down more would do it, but nope of course that wasn't it either. How about a flick to the right? Nope. Dragging it to the right? Agh! It's trying to dock into split screen mode! I dragged it around some more hoping for different behavior before dropping it back into place and again trying a flick to the right using the handle at the top. And that FINALLY did it. Apparently I didn't put enough enthusiasm into the first flick I tried... What a pain in the ass.

I don't like how sensitive to speed some of the actions are. I have similar issues with bringing up the dock. I usually end up going to the home screen instead.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#343

Post by IncRnd »

dmitriid wrote: post #308
IncRnd wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only problem that is solved is running multiple browsers in VMs in a cloud. Everything else is anyone's guess. That false hyperbole. Just because you do not know something, that doesn't mean that nobody else does. > To come up with an automated test for the problem in the OP you have to be a) aware of the problem and b) have a way to test that scrollbars do/don't appear. Good luck with that. No luck is needed,…

> Just because you do not know something, that doesn't mean that nobody else does. For the third time you've failed to show how to test for the problem described in OP. It tells me that you don't know > test frameworks already exist for testing the screen for the presence of UI elements Which ones test for the presence/absence of scrollbars?

Honestly, it seems like you are playing a game. Did you perform a search of tools that can test ui? There are lots of them. I find it hard to believe that you think there aren't any. That's like saying that compilers don't compile C code anymore, because you only compile C++.

I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use. I know the testers at our shop do it with an house built framework as well as with commercial ones. On our company's security team, various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools I mentioned, and she said it would take her a few minutes.

These are commodity tools. There is nothing special with any of them.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#344

Post by IncRnd »

dmitriid wrote: post #197
IncRnd wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several online cross-platform browser testing services. You don't even need a non-mac yourself. If the company is large enough to alwayus test locally, most modern testers will use VMs or some sort of containerization for repeatable determinism. This is absolutely a solved problem.

This is a non-answer to my question.

No. It was an answer. The correct answer is that there are many ways to test for this. Just look for one.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#345

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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…

Discoverability is also a fascinating challenge for those home voice-control devices. What exactly can an Alexa do? Did it get any new features recently? Who could say? You could may be get an email telling you about its cool new ability to rename timers or something, but other than explicitly reading about the new features in a manual or newsletter, how would you possibly think to ask?

I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#346

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

WorldMaker wrote: post #252
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…

I have this complaint about iOS all the time that often the "clean look" in iOS leads to grids that exactly match the available viewport and without scrollbars you have no idea if there is more to scroll without idly swiping things around. I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or…

Oh so I'm not alone (iOS user here). There have been parts of UIs I have totally failed to notice because I didn't realise you could scroll, because it didn't look like anything was beyond the screen.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#347

Post by foxtrottbravo »

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…

Heck,

I'm know my tech and I can't figure out how to reliably get Safari on IOS to display the bar at the bottom.

Makes me crazy

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#348

Post by shultays »

dgellow wrote: post #12

Another one of such thing: please try to scroll on your site using a mouse wheel from time to time, even if you're normally using a touchpad (from your laptop or an external one)! Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad. Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.

And spacebar!

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#349

Post by no_wizard »

KayL wrote: post #333
no_wizard wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WSL2 is wonderful, I use it on my primary development machine. Docker doesn't have as many pain points as it used to, and I generally find that I can get around the OS without too much issue, and the new Windows Terminal App helps a ton (its no iTerm2, but its better than anything else I can find) I still miss macOS, so much, because - Mac Software I was accustomed to using (and it was lot) is no longer avail…

WSL2 has no built-in background services. That's a huge issue for me. And I don't have 100% confidence in it. It has many little bugs on each builds. Why do you miss Finder? Search feature? Preview.app? Opposite to you, I never like it.

If you didn't buy into Finder and other built-in apps on macOS, it can be easier to see less value, that is true, but effectually I feel like that dismisses perfectly reasonable expectations a macOS user has about using a platform. Frankly, Apple hasn't given as much love to macOS over the last 5-6 years in particular as they do their other platforms (in some ways, justifiable, otherwise, its frustrating) however, even with their basically trickle of updates to the desktop platform in that time, no other desktop platform could even match them on baseline functionality and user experience. Even though I'm certain Microsoft has more people working on Windows 10 than Apple has working on macOS. Even Ubuntu with its open source contributors likely dwarfs Apple's resources on this, yet nobody comes close to matching the user experience to me.

As for software, I miss Finder because I felt the interface was intuitive and I really liked the features Finder like tags, smart folders, and the way you could custom it with extensions and settings. I like the built in software, like Preview in particular.

I have yet to have anyone show me an OS that comes close to matching macOS out of the box. Even conceding customizations, they're just so lacking in comparison, to someone who 'clicked' with macOS.

Granted, not everyone likes macOS, and thats fine, but to come at it from a place that its so easy to migrate to another platform, ignores so many things about macOS that make it great to a macOS user.

My job requires Windows 10, thats how I ended up on the platform. I learned to get around and replicate as much of the features as I could, but so many are just fundamentally missing and even if I wanted to pay for the functionality (and for so much of it I would), the software doesn't even exist.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#350

Post by baggy_trough »

marssaxman wrote: post #320
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.

Oh god. My phone has one of those - there's some sort of swipe gesture which puts it into a split-screen mode, which I have only ever invoked accidentally, and I have no idea how to get rid of it - none of my various guesses at possible anti-swipe actions have worked. When I pull my phone out of my pocket to discover that it has gotten into this state, I just reboot.

iPad multitasking modes are like that. Easy to trigger, impossible to get away from without a Google search.
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