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Scrollbar Blindness

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#391

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

You don't need to "open" it.

You set the phone next to the terminal and the card comes up when radio contact is made.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#392

Post by Anthony-G »

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…

Upvoted because I never knew about this. As a user who prefers keyboard short-cuts, I usually press Windows key with D (alternatively, right-click on the task-bar and choose Show Desktop) if I want to minimise all windows.

Anyhow, I just tried shaking a window from my work laptop and discovered that this behaviour activates on the second change of the direction in rapid succession.

While I was experimenting, I also discovered that shaking the window again restores the other windows so you don't have to restore them individually if/when this happens accidentally.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#393

Post by strbean »

SilasX wrote: post #383
elliekelly wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Not to mention the total lack of affordances for "I want to see this something from 2 years ago" in most implementations. Usually even the back end works on a "last ID" cursor system, so even savvy users can't jump back. Holding the end key for 10 minutes is not fun.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#394

Post by snypox »

foxtrottbravo wrote: post #347
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…

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

Scroll down.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#395

Post by SCNP »

avhon1 wrote: post #352
SCNP wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I might ask, what are you using for vertical tabs? I haven't found a good add-on that shows the tabs on the side and also hides the tabs on the top.

Firefox Quantum made it so that extensions can't hide the tabs on top. It can only be done manually, by making and editing a userChrome.css file. https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...

Awesome! Thanks!

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#396

Post by robertoandred »

vbsteven wrote: post #102
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…

I think the macOS monoculture is going to go away in the next few years because on one side macOS is becoming more and more developer hostile with each release and on the other side WSL (and WSL2) is improving the Windows developer experience a lot. I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.

Nah, Windows is still Windows, no matter how much Linux they try to bolt on. Let me know when they've got proxy icons.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#397

Post by lordnacho »

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…

So just a couple of days ago I decided to revamp my VPS VM host. I ended up putting Ubuntu on a VM.

So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things.

I open a window, and decide I need to resize it.

There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it.

I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this.

I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#398

Post by snypox »

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.

Usually, I don’t even know how did I trigger it. It takes me a few seconds to get out of it..

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#399

Post by lordnacho »

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.

Plus that one time when you need two apps next to each other, once a year, you forget WTF the gesture was. It certainly isn't something logical.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#400

Post by boogies »

lordnacho wrote: post #397
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…

So just a couple of days ago I decided to revamp my VPS VM host. I ended up putting Ubuntu on a VM. So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things. I open a window, and decide I need to resize it. There's no cursor…

This is how my WM (dwm) works (except I patched it to use Super instead of Alt), and it’s a better way of resizing (not requiring such finicky mouse placement). But that is really weird to hear XFCE doesn’t allow both methods like JWM (and I would have assumed, any WM not aimed at relatively extreme minimalists and power users), I wonder if it’s a bug.
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