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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#51

Post by _f1dq »

city41 wrote: post #37
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#52

Post by nobodyandproud »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

I actually prefer the current scollbar situation. I HATE when people hijack it but I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. I can always scroll a tiny amount (magic mouse) to see my progress. I really do like the clearer look to UI's without the bar. > No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is. > No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post. I've literally never had either…

This happens all the time for me.

When the page scrollbar is thin, and one of the page-width elements in the page also has a scrollbar on the right?

I am fighting on both mobile AND the desktop!

It’s extremely bad UI design when even on the desktop browser with a mouse and keyboard, I end up fighting to grab the page scrollbar.

And it’s not the page designers fault here.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#53

Post by jacobsenscott »

I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets. You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no matter what application you where in. Building the UI was considered they easy part. You could even draw the thing with drawing tools! Since the native widgets were designed by people who spend all day thinking about UI, user testing UI, etc everything pretty much just worked, and worked well.

Fast forward to today. There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app. So everyone rolls their own. Everyone keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. Everyone is chasing fads. There is no consistency from app to app. Today building the UI is the hard part.

(x-windows was the exception of course - you could choose from a dozen badly designed window managers and widget sets.)

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#55

Post by mark-r »

thrower123 wrote: post #33
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

Desktop software has never recovered from Office adopting the terrible Ribbon element instead of proper menus and toolbars.

Have you run into lots of desktop apps using a Ribbon style interface, other than Office? Microsoft didn't do themselves any favors by trying to patent the design and keep an iron fist on it.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#56

Post by yeldarb »

city41 wrote: post #37
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

Looks like it only does this on sufficiently "small" screens. This is what it looks like on my external display: https://imgur.com/a/DJBiYJ6

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#57

Post by shadowgovt »

m4r35n357 wrote: post #38

Idiots removed the triangles at top & bottom that you could use to scroll without dragging. I think they did it because they are stupid and evil.

They did it because the buttons took up room, were used by nearly nobody, and (in the case of the "jump to top" / "jump to bottom" buttons) destroyed the user's scroll state in a non-undoable way that was too easy to trigger.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#58

Post by eropple »

flyinghamster wrote: post #18
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar. My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#59

Post by bitwize »

ibero wrote: post #5

This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here. The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good. I do wonder if that is necessarily true. Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?

Yes, one can argue that, at which point one would be considered a marketroid and not trusted.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#60

Post by jerf »

ibero wrote: post #5

This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here. The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good. I do wonder if that is necessarily true. Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?

"Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?"

Boy, doesn't that just have the distinctive ring of an uncomfortable truth... at least for some of these cases.

I offer in counterpoint that engagement-focused sites have probably already determined that their content is "less engaging" if it's long enough for a scrollbar to appear at all. If it wasn't for the literal need to stuff 100%+ of the screen with ads, there'd probably be a lot of modern engagement-focused websites doing everything they can to fit on a single screen without scrolling at all.

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