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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#461

Post by userbinator »

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…

There's another "feature" which I rarely hit, and I don't even know how I did, what it's called or for, but when it happens, a draggable divider shows up in the middle of the screen, all my windows get "crushed" on the left side, and the right side is a dark blue/purple blank. I can drag the divider to restore the desktop, but it seriously angers me since none of my windows' original positions nor sizes get restored. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to disable it either. I believe it appeared starting with Win8, as I never saw it in earlier versions.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#462

Post by jetpks »

SilasX wrote: post #381
bradstewart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, redire…

Not saying I can make this better for your use case, but I'm curious if you use tap to click? i.e. click with a simple touch. I love the big track pads and also hate the tap to click setting (I want to press to click) and don't have this problem.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#463

Post by dhosek »

Aeolun wrote: post #449
dmkolobov wrote: post #445

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.

I worked as a developer for a design agency in the year 2000. This was a frustratingly common perspective from the designers.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#464

Post by userbinator »

Santosh83 wrote: post #25

Increasingly many sites are opting for overlay scrollbars that are exceedingly difficult to actually use. It's almost as if they don't want you to use the scrollbar yet provide one for compliance. They are often very thin (just a few pixels) and coloured dark gray upon black background and won't expand to a bigger size until you successfully squint and hunt it down and precisely position the pointer over it.

...and thanks to some apps doing away with window borders completely, as well as everything becoming some drab grey colour, many times I've mistakenly clicked in and activated a different window while trying to manipulate a nearly-invisible "automatically expanding" scrollbar.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#465

Post by gsich »

liability wrote: post #91
bradstewart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers (seemingly a lot of them?) use a touchpad as their primary input device on a regular basis? I guess this is an example of being in my own bubble, but I can't stand touchpads. I've used the touchpad on MacBook, like, twice in 2 years.

I would expect devs who use macbooks to generally use them the same way as the general population generally uses them. I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice. One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm sim…

>I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice.

Better accuracy and muscle memory. Faster. It's not just for "gamers".

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#466

Post by underwater »

munchbunny wrote: post #429
bmitc wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My new air conditioner control panel suffers from this. It has up/down/left/right buttons where it switches between horizontal navigation plus select/deselect or vertical navigation plus select/deselect randomly. Programming a day takes around 30 key presses. And there is no bulk update functionality.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#467

Post by jhanschoo »

Note that in some instances `scroll` instead of `auto` is warranted. When a scrollbar is placed because of `auto`, its contents are laid out differently than `scroll`, and might cut out some content.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#468

Post by nogridbag »

dgellow wrote: 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.

That website froze my browser (Chrome) for about 5 seconds and then continued to scroll poorly. 2018 MBP with 32GB memory. I never really had a problem with apple's marketing pages previously. This one's really bad.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#469

Post by antod »

Nition wrote: post #456
bmitc wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That was only on the last generation or so of VCRs. For the first decade or two, programming them was like setting an old digital watch with 2 or 3 buttons and making different digits on the clock flash.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#470

Post by dmitriid »

IncRnd wrote: post #343
dmitriid wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you do not know something, that doesn't mean that nobody else does. For the third time you've failed to show how to test for the problem described in OP. It tells me that you don't know > test frameworks already exist for testing the screen for the presence of UI elements Which ones test for the presence/absence of scrollbars?

Honestly, it seems like you are playing a game. Did you perform a search of tools that can test ui? There are lots of them. I find it hard to believe that you think there aren't any. That's like saying that compilers don't compile C code anymore, because you only compile C++. I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use. I know the testers at our shop do it with an house built…

> Honestly, it seems like you are playing a game. Did you perform a search of tools that can test ui? There are lots of them.

It would'be been so easy to just answer the question I asked. Instead, it's now a thread of non-answers and thinly veiled ad-hominem attacks.

The rest of your long answer is once again working hard on avoiding the answer.

> I find it hard to believe that you think there aren't any.

I didn't say there weren't any. I asked, "which ones let you test the problem in OP".

> I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use

Ah, my assumption that you don't know what you're talking about is proven correct.

> On our company's security team, various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium

Question: scrollbars.

"Answers": tools click on buttons, scripting security exploits, I don't know what libraries testers are using.

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

> and she said it would take her a few minutes.

Given your answers in this thread, I seriously doubt your ability to ask a proper question to "the people familiar with the tools". Especially given the fact that you don't know what libraries testers use and that you, apparently, don't do any testing yourself.

See, frontend testing is very far from being "a solved problem". Especially for quirks as described in OP. But you wouldn't know because you, well, don't know.

> These are commodity tools. There is nothing special with any of them.

Indeed they are. Indeed there is nothing special. And this still doesn't answer the question.

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