Scrollbar Blindness • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#361

Post by myself248 » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:20 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…

Or, swipe-sideways on SMS and that's how you can see timestamps!

It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working.

Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#362

Post by temporallobe » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

noodlenotes wrote: post #315

reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being tech savvy can be a burden when it comes to discovering new features because you're afraid of making a "stupid" mistake. Accidentally posting to Facebook is something the tech illiterate do, not us , so why would we click a random icon when we're not sure if it will do something embarrassing? I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when 1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly e…

> It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.

This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#363

Post by dubcanada » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

NorwegianDude wrote: post #262

Filligree wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For you, but it's an issue.

Anyone who has used any Linux knows HiDPI or mixed DPI monitors are a massive issue on Linux. Even when you get your xrandr configured perfectly fine, disconnecting is a hassle. And that's completely ignoring apps, QT, GTK, etc all handle DPI differently. So you need a different config with DPI setting on each.

One of the best I've used is PopOS with the HiDPI daemon enabled. But even that has issues.

Even Windows can't deal properly with having a 4k laptop screen and a 2k monitor attached. Have to deal with weird text scaling issues and other weird scaling issues.

But MacOS can and does it beautifully.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#364

Post by coldpie » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

voldacar wrote: post #336

eatingCake wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thing is the worst! HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced set DisallowShaking dword to 1

Honest question: where do you discover registry stuff like this?

Google "Windows disable shaking".

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#365

Post by Viliam1234 » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #260

reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I openly admit it these days. If I had a VCR today I'd be the one struggling to figure out how to record something with it, even though as a kid I loved that stuff. And I'm only in my 30's. It's not really about whether I'm able to figure it out (if 8 year old me could figure it out, 30+ year old should be able to as well), it's about whether I have the patience for a badly designed UI. One of the common responses I…

I am sometimes amazed how complicated UI can someone create with e.g. four arrows and two extra buttons.

Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.

Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#366

Post by marv3lls » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #247

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it. Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it. I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become mo…

Back when search bars were table view headers, you had to do non-trivial work to hide them by default (which Apple did anyways, because Apple). With iOS 11 search controllers can integrate directly into the navigation bar, and in that case the search bar will be collapsed by default.

Integrate directly? Like is there a magnifying glass icon or ANYTHING to make it discoverable? Or do I just have to guess I should scroll up in i.e. Settings? cough Thanks, Apple.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#367

Post by dnr » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

scaryclam wrote: post #105

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…

Here's a link for something I use on such news and blog sites: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ I works a surprising amount of the time!

I use this probably a hundred times a day :( It makes me so sad.

I've considered writing an extension to kill them all by default, but I'm afraid I'll break some site in a way that really confuses me and end up wasting more time figuring out what happened than I save with the extension.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#368

Post by robocat » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

baggy_trough wrote: post #350

marssaxman wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can disable it on the iPad from:

Settings | Home Screen & Dock | Multitasking | Allow Multiple Apps

No idea if the same setting exists on iPhone or if it disabled split screen through.

The whole feature is so badly designed on iPad. I was forever detaching a Safari page and ending up with two Safari apps. So tapping the Safari icon wouldn't take me back, it only takes you to the detached page, and you think you have "lost" all the other pages. You need to close the detached page (none of that would be obvious to a novice). Also getting a page to detach into a popup by mistake, and then not being able to get rid of it (I still don't know the correct swiping motions!)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#369

Post by SilasX » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #361

reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, swipe-sideways on SMS and that's how you can see timestamps! It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working. Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.

Oh wow! Thanks! I never knew that. I thought that info just wasn't accessible. It should be always visible ... at least, for the most recent message, since you'll want to know how old it is.

Side note, I've always suspected it's an issue of too many cooks in the kitchen. They spend tons on UX but end up with something barely usable.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#370

Post by pseudalopex » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #266

bb123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Laptops had touch pads even when mobile devices had styluses.