Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#381

Post by SilasX »

bradstewart wrote: post #88
newsbinator wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full stack dev, 8 ~ 12 hours a day on my 2015 MBP 13" touchpad. No regrets.

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…

(Not your comment's parent) Apple making touchpads bigger is why I stick to their 13" 2015 MacBook air! When I got a recent Pro for work, it was nearly unusable from the oversized, oversensitive trackpad. Yes, even after setting all the options that (I was assured) would make it stop picking up unintended presses. When typing, I'd unavoidably brush the trackpad and cause the cursor to move somewhere and click, redirecting my input.

Like your comment's parent, I used the trackpad because I prefer doing everything from the keyboard and so prefer the trackpaid for things that require a mouse-like interface.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#382

Post by donatj »

As someone who has scroll bars always turned on, I actually added a step in our CI that forbids `overflow: scroll`. auto is fine, scroll is never OK.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#383

Post by SilasX »

elliekelly wrote: post #92
pcmaffey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll pages have also contributed to their demise...

Infinite scroll often make it nearly impossible to click on the site's privacy policy or terms of service in the page footer without going into dev tools. Whenever I come across that issue I wonder whether it's a feature or a bug.

Yes, they also have the problem that they (are usually implemented in such a way that they) break the back button[1] and make it so you can't easily jump to a well-defined block of the results you know you haven't seen.

I also see them frequently have a bug where they'll just keep cycling through the same first page-equivalent of results.

[1] If you click a result and then hit back, it usually just reloads the page and starts you from the beginning. I think the function of a back button changed at some point. It used to be that "back" was always instant and took you to the exact state of the page before you clicked a link. Now, there's a huge lag on all but the most minimal sites (like HN) and some reload of something gets triggered.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#384

Post by TeMPOraL »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #238
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…

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…

> so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance

I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:

(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)

As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].

Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.

--

[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#385

Post by sergeykish »

derefr wrote: post #165
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…

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 have such display. It is quite spacious once you remove all decorations [1], that is no window decorations (xmonad), hide URL bar and browser tabs [2], no page scrollbars [3]. I encourage everyone to try at least browser addons.

[1] http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convert-to-popup/i...

[3] https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars # chromium, firefox has another rule:

    html {
      scrollbar-width: none
    }

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#386

Post by epistasis »

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.

This idea of "reducing clutter" is just ridiculous... we should be focused on accessible information density, not low-information displays.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#387

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#388

Post by pvorb »

andi999 wrote: post #245
frereubu wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. I once had a really interesting conversation with an accessibility person who said in passing "accessibility is for everyone ". He didn't make a big point of it, but it really stuck with me, and I'm always reminded of it when I see things like this. I've been working in the digital world since the late 90s, keep everything up to date, have a recent iPhone etc. etc. etc. and I'm stil occasionall…

Got a new android phone (i think it was huawei), couldnt answer calls. I was thinking I as always has to press or slide the green phone icon, but actually had to move the center grey icon on the green phone icon.

Oh yeah, this took me several missed calls until I figured it out. I wonder how that UI element emerged.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#389

Post by strbean »

epistasis wrote: post #386
myself248 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This idea of "reducing clutter" is just ridiculous... we should be focused on accessible information density, not low-information displays.

Excessive information can be overwhelming. I fully hate these design decisions, but I can see where the original drive to reduce clutter came from. This seems like "way too much of a good thing" rather than an outright bad thing.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#390

Post by robertoandred »

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…

Any operating system would look like that on such a large resolution.
Post reply on HN