Live data from Hacker News

Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

501–510 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#501
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been super annoyed by trying to grab the scroll thing on the bar in a super long pdf. It keeps disappearing and on long PDFs where I want to scroll to, say, the middle, it disappears before I can precisely grab it. It's maddening sometimes.

I resort to the down key to make the scrollbar appear without losing my position in the doc. In fact, in Preview, my default workflow is to click on the main content panel as soon as the doc open; else the down key might take me to the next page, which defeats the purpose.

Why don't you just turn the scrollbars on permanently in System Preferences? It's under General > Show scroll bars always.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#502
And discoverability is the no 1 problem of the command line interface, that's why a lot of people don't like the command line so much.

It would be a lot nicer if, while typing a command, a list of options came up, along with a short explanation and example, and by clicking the option the full documentation for it would come up.

But that cannot happpen, console apps have no connection to a UI.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#503
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed (re shake again to reverse), but not always - ie if you let off the mouse click , there is no option to shake again to undo the initial shake. Bottom line , I disableded this “feature”. I do think this is one of the best examples of the issues called out by this article/thread. (Or maybe how google docs has a button covering the scroll bar slider once you scroll to the very bottom of a docs file)

This isn't correct. Shaking the window again will restore the minimised windows, whether it's from the original mouse-down or a future mouse-down. But I agree that it's a bad feature, and IMO it's a rare miss from the Windows UI team who if nothing else have developed excellent window management.

This isn't correct. There is something that happens which makes it forget which windows were open. I am not sure what it is. But is definitely the case that sometimes, I can shake again to put everything back the way I always wanted it, and sometimes I cannot.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#504
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an internal app at work that only has a hamburger button. It makes me sad every time I click on it.

You mean the entire user interface is blank, except for three lines? And then you get to decide what you're going to do in the app?

[deleted]

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#505

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…

I had actually thought Apple might have removed the Repeat functionality when I upgraded iOS a few years ago; when someone else showed me how to do it--which involved scrolling the entire app to find some new hidden features--it felt more like a prank than real software :/.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#506
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from this [1], even more countries don't use it. [1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34950/which-large...

This source is not very trustworthy. No one usually uses 24-hour format in a few places not noted here, such as Holland, a decent-sized European country that many people have heard of. But they are not shaded in this chart. So I wonder how many others are also not shaded.

In many European countries, the 12-hour format is used in speech, but not in writing. You'd say "Let's meet at seven", but you'd write "Let's meet at 19:00". The context being software, I'd say it's a pretty solid claim to say most countries use a 24-hour clock.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#507

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…

> I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.

I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#508
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.

additionally, if your mouse is over top of the web page when you scroll, and your scrolling hovers over some item that responds to scrolling (say a text box), the page scrolling comes to a stop or stutters until the text bar scrolls.

Annoying. The only fix is to hover over the scroll bar itself (and I have macos -> system prefences -> general -> show scroll bars: always)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#509
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Designers != Artists Designers are supposed to create things that humans can relate to and use, the end-user should always be in mind. They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder. So I don’t see the distinction here.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#510
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Unfortunately, our UX engineers are on the front-end team. And anyone working with React is just a code monkey, so if they suggest anything related to their area of expertise they cannot possibly be right.
Post reply on HN