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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

481–490 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#481

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…

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#482

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’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…

> The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work

This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#483

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 hate icons without text!

"Here's an image, guess what is supposed to happen when you click it, also i will give you no info on hover over -- you must push me and then try to guess what i did!" (btw if there's a bug or a configuration state in the app that you or i am unaware of -- you might've pushed me at the wrong time and i might've let you do that)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this bubble overestimate the popularity of anything Apple. I once had a discussion with a coworker at a major company known for its app, where I was complaining about an Android bug and he genuinely asked "does anybody even use Android?" And I responded, "only the majority of users in every country around the world including the US. It's even 50/50 on our app!" Afterward, I found the internal numbers for em…

iOS has the majority market share in the US (~60% nationwide). You’re completely right that this doesn’t hold true for other countries, and that ignoring Android is not the play, though.

This seems to be getting downvotes, so here’s my source: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#486
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.

Is that page supposed to have weird black rectangular backgrounds in places[1][2]? Is that just design I don't understand or is it a bug?

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/PGdyt1c.jpg [2]: https://i.imgur.com/AXLi4Yu.jpg

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hate icons without text! "Here's an image, guess what is supposed to happen when you click it, also i will give you no info on hover over -- you must push me and then try to guess what i did!" (btw if there's a bug or a configuration state in the app that you or i am unaware of -- you might've pushed me at the wrong time and i might've let you do that)

Exactly. Why should e.g. a floppy disk symbol signify anything to anybody born after 2000.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#488

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 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…

Accessibility makes things easier not only for those who need it, but, somewhat surprisingly, also for quite a lot of people who wouldn’t normally think of themselves as even needing or wanting any help. This is usually referred to as the Curb Cut Effect, and has been extensively discussed.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#489
post #453
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But "designers" are surely understood to be engineers. This problem exists because the company creates positions for designers. If positions were created for usability engineers, we'd get a completely different outcome. (I wish repeating this over and over on social media would cause it to happen.)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#490

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 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…

> Who thought that was a good idea?

A designer. Probably the same person who wanted to turn links from blue-and-underlined to same uniform gray with zero indication

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