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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

451–460 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#451
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guess which ones often have problems joining zoom meetings As a linux user, I'd like to say that I've seen that happen just as often with OSX users on my team. I think that's just Zoom's shitty app. But I do agree about peripheral hardware issues plaguing Linux. Bluetooth headphones are still such a hassle on Ubuntu 20.04.

I think it's crazy to seriously consider using an OS where something as basic as Bluetooth is a hassle.

Bluetooth has never not been a hassle in my experience - and that goes for Android, Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS. There’s always something with the device or driver.

This goes especially for audio.

I’m going to guess that Apple peripherals + Apple OS on Apple hardware is actually hassle-free but then what’s the point of a standard.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#452
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I (perhaps because of masochism) click on links to Quora answers I see in my email digest, and it will me to the answer within an infiniscroll page. If I follow any link and click back ... the answer is gone. I have to go back to my email again and get it from there if I want to see it again.

It almost seems like, beyond a very low threshold, UX gets worse as you throw more engineers at it.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#453
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do j…

A while ago I had a discussion about our UI with our designer, and when I mentioned that nothing seems to work as you’d expect, he said he wants people to learn a unique way of dealing with our interface. It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.

As a designer, I'm ashamed of reading this. This is the opposite of what designers are supposed to do. UI is not art, you can't just do whatever you want. You need to abide by user patterns and conventions, because our job is to get people from A to B in the most efficient way possible. Period. Your designer is just bad.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#454
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can grab the scroll bar to scroll at hyper speed I think it's called using a scrollbar. :) That's typically how they work. To spare readers the content marketing piece: tap and hold to grab it.

That wasn't how they worked on nearly any modern multi-touch capacitive touchscreen device.

Android scrollbars have worked that way for quite a while iirc. Not sure about windows phone but I don't see why MS would change that behavior.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#455
I recall a point by Jobs et al. wherein the original case for GUI drop-down menus was motivated by a clear desire for discoverability, versus the arcane keyboard shortcuts of the IBM applications of the time.

That stuck with me for a long time, and I remembered it when MacOS and iOS first began departing from that philosophy with their modern looks. I would say Jony Ive contributed a lot to this transition from user-friendliness to design-led, form-over-function.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#456
post #401

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…

There was often an additional on-screen interface on VCRs for setting up timed recordings, usually with giant white text on a blue background.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#457
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of title bars, the trend to move content into the title bar is terrible for usability. There is nowhere left to click to move a window. Not to mention each app choosing a different color/style for this region. Do designers assume everyone runs 1 full screen window at a time?

Let's talk about the new Slack. The crowded title bar (with the hamburger icon, the search box, and now even the profile icon) means you can only grab it for dragging in two specific zones. Even worse, the window cannot be dragged at all when search is active, as the title bar gets completely overshadowed by the search popup. Absolute trash of an UI.

IntelliJ IDEA also fell victim to this trend of abusing the title bar, but they are be reverting the change and providing a setting after listening to the inevitable criticism: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-219212

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was planning to reply to your parent comment that discoverability has always been an issue for me when I work with Apple devices. Whenever I use my wife's iPhone or Mac for a couple of minutes, I get frustrated because everything is all over the place, none of the apps work well together, and everything is hidden. Back on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. Just to point out,…

I appreciated the Windows Phone 7/8 and early Win10 approach to compact icons which was/is: Just have a button next to the icons that expands them to show labels when you press it. Unfortunately later redesigns to Win10 apps seemed to drift away from these patterns towards just having unlabeled icons everywhere.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#459
Whenever I looked for website templates to purchase, I always hated those that had a jQuery library to "restore" the scrollbar.

I misunderstood the intent and I thought that they were just replacing the scrollbar to style it, which as a side effect broke the behavior with a mouse in Windows/Linux, but it took me long to understand that it was because Mac OS removed them by default and it was not just designers being obsessed about styling the scrollbars...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#460
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.

This highlights the bigger issue of web developers and designers only working on the latest and greatest hardware with the fastest performance and the best user experience. Their users may not have access to the same hardware, while developers and designers are totally blind to how their software might perform on anything but a recent model MacBook Pro or XPS.

Shoutout to the folks over at Axosoft who clearly have never even looked at gitkraken on a 1080p monitor, ever.
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