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Scrollbar Blindness

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#511

Post by endless1234 »

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…

The most amazing thing about this feature is that no matter how much I try, I never seem to be able to re-shake the window in the proper way (which would bring all windows back up again). But nice that it's at least possible to disable it via a registry hack.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#512

Post by squiggleblaz »

faichai wrote: post #509
squiggleblaz wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder.

But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.

(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#513

Post by tonetheman »

This is only a problem for the web because web developers are using broken OSX to develop.

The amount of hidden-ness/clevery fuckery in OSX is maddening. I would implore every one to complain to Apple to fix their broken OS.

The web is fine, the garbage developers are putting out is because of the broken dumpster fire of OSX.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#514

Post by bregma »

bmitc wrote: post #401
munchbunny wrote: post #260

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…

> Nothing is hidden on a VCR.

12:00

12:00

12:00

12:00

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#515

Post by notacoward »

rapind wrote: post #332
reaperducer wrote: post #163

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 do think age can play a role, or rather experience. As you live through more UI churn the less your willing to invest time into each new UI generation or fad. If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother? This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.

It might be not so much age as experience. With experience comes expectations of what a control should look like and how it should behave.

* It's the experienced users who were were less likely to recognize the "burger menu" or the three dots (does that have a catchy name) as something potentially useful. They didn't look like "real" controls. It was the less experienced users who just naturally tried clicking on anything near the top that looked interesting, or waving the cursor around looking for hovertext on active components.

* Confronted with a landing page that seems to have nothing more than some splashy graphics and a few words - notably no scrollbars - experienced users are likely to wonder if the page is broken for them (because that was a very common experience at the height of the browser wars and still persists). Less experienced users who grew up with smartphones are more likely to start swiping right away.

A user who was older but not experienced with computers would align more closely with the young 'uns on most of this. When everything's completely new you just start experimenting. It's when you think you know things work but they don't work that way any more that things start to get frustrating.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#516

Post by qwertox »

I also have this issue with the disappearing window borders.

I remember on IRIX they were so bold, a real tool to be used. Same on Windows up to and including Windows 7. Now it's like you have a 2 pixel wide invisible border, hard to click, which may be the shadow of the window, or at the edge in the window; it's hard, specially when working over VNC. Nothing is gained by freeing up those 10 horizontal and vertical pixels.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#517

Post by DJBunnies »

andi999 wrote: post #487
breatheoften wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would you replace it with?

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#518

Post by tobyhinloopen »

Kwantuum wrote: post #249
liability wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. Why would you expect that? What concrete advantage does a mouse have over a trackpad for gaming that doesn't translate to regular use?

Using mouse buttons (both RMB and LMB) at the same time while also independently moving the cursor.

Rarely you want to hold both mouse buttons or hold RMB while also move the cursor.

Source: I can play first person perspective games quite decently on my macbook using the trackpad, but holding the mouse buttons while aiming is the hardest.

Why would I subject myself to such misery? Playing games in train.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#519

Post by occamschainsaw »

ziml77 wrote: post #342
asciimov wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features. I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability. Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display i…

30 here. On my iPad, if I bring up an app in the floating view, I often have to rediscover how to dismiss it. I just tried to do it now and this is how it went: My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar a…

I struggled with this too. You can use the mnemonic that it behaves like an iPhone(the new ones without the home button) on top of your iPad apps. The gestures are the same then. Swiping from the bottom of the floating window behaves the same as it does in an iPhone screen. Not very intuitive but I guess it’s the same framework.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#520

Post by andi999 »

DJBunnies wrote: post #517
andi999 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would you replace it with?

Awesome question. Replacing it would be worse of course (because then not even the old timers understand it). One thing i liked about google docs?? Was automatic save, maybe this is the trend. If you take a 5mb picture on your smartphone there is no question do you want to save it. Space is cheap.

But if i really have to come up with something, I'd say green arrow pointing up. Meaning 'upload to your (own private) cloud'

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