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

421–430 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#421

Post by mixmastamyk »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #402
breakfastduck wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so strange to me to read these kind of comments, and to even see this article. I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen. It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see! No negative feelings toward people who prefer…

> how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see! Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability? Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop…

Yep. "Why get my bearings at a glance when I could miss things and/or wonder and poll the machine about it instead?" :D

There are subtler themes for scrollbars as well so that they don't have to stand out.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#422

Post by esrauch »

bmitc wrote: post #401
munchbunny wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If I had a VCR today I'd be the one struggling to figure out how to record something with it That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden. Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hid…

I recall VCRs having a lot of nonobvious digital controls that involved primitive onscreen HUD that involved arbitrary buttons to navigate. Everyone understood play/stop/record, what was confusing was setting the on-screen time using those same buttons.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#423

Post by l0b0 »

While on the subject of people creating user-hostile experiences, try disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" in Firefox. Now instead of a different set of fonts for every single website because of some misguided form-over-content design wankery I can read things with one less distraction.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#424

Post by CarbyAu »

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…

Maybe it is that same "Older so I lack patience for poor design" but nowadays when I play a game I often - not always - have a web page on my other monitor so I can look up how to do XYZ unnecessarily complicated stupid shit. Crafting recipes are the biggest failures.

Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!

Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#425

Post by hombre_fatal »

dahauns wrote: post #233
scaryclam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Very nice! And for Nuke Overdrive mode, add a check for position: sticky, i.e. (function () { var elpos,i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i

Here's that code written by someone who has used Javascript in the last 10 years:

    (function () {
        for (const node of document.querySelectorAll('body *')) {
            if (['fixed', 'sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)) {
                node.style.display = 'none'
                // node.remove()
            }
        }
    })()
I found tree mutation too aggressive in the first site I tested it on (the site's JS code expected the navbar to exist, so it just blew up with runtime errors). Simply changing the display property is sufficient.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#426

Post by bstar77 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #198
bstar77 wrote: post #137

I have dealt with this problem in an Electron app I designed and support. The different platform scrollbar behaviors drove me mad because of my insistence on a common experience. I really like the hidden scrollbars that Apple settled on. They are easy to identify by hovering the cursor over scroll-able content and they just act as an overlay over the content. In windows, the content is actually shifted the width of t…

That's a lot of work to make sure every user's experience on their platform is inconsistent.

Seems like you responded to the wrong comment.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#427

Post by mark-r »

jchw wrote: post #404
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…

The reason why they pull the "what about the elderly?" card is simple. Most of us can figure it out, even if it's stupid. My parents however have a much, much harder time trying to figure out how to do something that is counter-intuitive. It's more about problem solving and experience with existing user interfaces than anything else. Designers nowadays definitely design things in a manner that suggests they assume so…

I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize what the hamburger button did. Designers just started assuming everybody knew.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#428

Post by CarbyAu »

snypox wrote: post #394
foxtrottbravo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not parent; your comment made me think, is that?:

- swipe down from anywhere in the vague middle of the page?

- swipe down on the right hand edge where an "invisble until you need it" scrollbar might be lurking?

- swipe down at the "not quite the top/bottom edge of the screen" because you don't want the OS swipe, you want the app swipe.

Aarrrgh! I don't even have an iPhone and the options drive me crazy.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#429

Post by munchbunny »

bmitc wrote: post #401
munchbunny wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If I had a VCR today I'd be the one struggling to figure out how to record something with it That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden. Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hid…

Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.

Some VCR’s had a timed recording setting. More commonly, and you see this on cars before they got touchscreens, there were settings and options that you had to navigate to by hitting a specific sequence of buttons to get to the appropriate menu.

The core loop was generally fine. It was when you needed anything else that suddenly you needed the manual.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#430

Post by CarbyAu »

baggy_trough wrote: post #187
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…

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.

On older Android a press and hold on an SMS conversation brought up the context menu options, of which there was only one: SPAM - block this number.

So if you accidentally hold the press for a fraction too long you block that number.

And then you wonder why your friend(s) don't love you anymore...

To unblock it, you have to go to the Contacts and dig through options there, the SMS app showed nothing of help. It wasn't obvious that you had it blocked!

Post reply on HN