Scrollbar Blindness • Hacker News Board

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#531

Post by majewsky » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

CarbyAu wrote: post #431

SilasX wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, the pinnacle of feature discoverability...

Oh yeah. Google to: - discover which registry key - discover how to craft shit in a game - to find where my Android setting is and what the searchterm/keyword for it is. Without google/duckduckgo 80% of the options in my world would be undiscoverable or take waaaay too much time to figure out.

> discover how to craft shit in a game

If you're refering to Minecraft, one of the reasons why Minecraft blew up that much was that it was around at the exact right time in history: when online gaming had become viable and let's-plays were just becoming a thing. Minecraft, as originally intended, is a communal experience where you learn from the friends you're playing with and from sources on the internet. If I had to describe Minecraft in one sentence, it would be "let me show you that cool thing I saw Pewdiepie do last week". The idea has become commonplace in video gaming at this point, but back then it was fairly new.

(That said, opaque game experiences have been successful before, like the original Legend of Zelda. I guess the schoolyard served a similar purpose back then.)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#532

Post by JadeNB » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

Voliokis wrote: post #206

scaryclam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a link for something I use on such news and blog sites: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ I works a surprising amount of the time!

This is great, but to use it I need to sticky the bookmarks bar to the top of my screen when vertical space is already precious. Does anybody know something else that does the same thing without this issue?

At least in Safari, your favourite bookmarks are accessible by ⌘⌥#. I've got Kill Sticky Headers on ⌘⌥1, so it takes no screen space but is just a keypress (or three) away at any time.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#533

Post by notacoward » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #165

supernova87a wrote: post #18

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…

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling. Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than deskto…

> where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware

That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#534

Post by notacoward » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #165

supernova87a wrote: post #18

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…

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling. Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than deskto…

> shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays

So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#535

Post by derefr » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #534

derefr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling. Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than deskto…

> shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.

> purchase new equipment

I'm not talking about shitty old laptops. I'm talking about shitty new laptops. There are laptops you can go into an electronics store and buy right now that have 1366x768 displays. And that's ridiculous.

Yes, these laptops are cheaper. But putting a 1080p panel in these laptops wouldn't be that much more expensive. Maybe an extra $0.50 on BOM, compared to the current design. Or, in fact, it might have exactly the same upstream cost. Why, then, use the shittier panel?

The 1366x768 display is purely there for market segmentation. It's an artificial constraint hardware makers impose on their low-spec devices, in order to make them unattractive to people with higher budgets.

A lot of these low-spec devices would be just fine for the small amounts of work many people have to do on computers, and so these people would buy them if they only needed "a little bit of" computer, even if they could afford something more expensive. (Just like you buy a $50 blender, not a $500 blender, if you're only making piña coladas.)

But the people who would consider these low-spec devices (despite having the budget for higher-spec devices as well), are pushed away from the low end, by these artificially-imposed pain points.

And that means that the people who do only have the budget for a low-spec laptop, are getting an artificially-imposed screwing, getting a shittier laptop than their money would buy them in an efficient market, purely because the supplier went to extra design effort to make their low-end products actively repel middle-end customers.

And taken in that lens, the fact that modern OSes don't work well on 1366x768 displays is actually kind of the point. It's not something the OS manufacturer can fix on their end. Because this would be a vicious cycle: if the OS began to work just fine on a 1366x768 display, then the laptop mfgrs would design their next series of low-end laptops to have even smaller displays, in order to re-introduce the market-segmenting "cramped feeling."

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#536

Post by derefr » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #533

derefr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling. Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than deskto…

> where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.

No? Infinite scroll is usually just a direct translation of SQL cursor semantics into the frontend. And an SQL cursor (or its equivalent for a disstributed store) is an optimal choice for a situation where:

1. there's a potentially-huge result set;

2. almost nobody ever wants to see the whole result set, but rather almost always just wants to see the first N chunks, and then drops off;

3. the results are sourced from a data lake, or from eventually-consistent geographic shards, or any other process where you need to actively gather results together with a map-reduce.

When these three factors apply, it becomes very expensive to know exactly how many results you will have, because that changes your partial streaming map-reduce workload into a complete map-reduce workload, over potentially billions of records, just to validate their inclusion and then count them.

Think "Twitter timeline." If every client displaying a Twitter timeline needed to know in advance how many tweets they could ever see, total, if they "scrolled all the way back" — then Twitter's servers would fall over from the load of calculating that number.

Another example is Google Search, which, while not "infinite scroll" on the client, is still a "map-reduced stream" on the backend. Google has put some extra effort into heuristic scheduling logic for its Search map-reduce: it grabs an initial 20-page-or-so chunk of the stream and caches it on a sticky-session node for you. This means that, if your search-result set is less than 20 pages, you get to know the actual result-set size. If it's more than 20 pages, though, Google Search reverts to exactly the same "you'll only know when you're at the end when you get there" semantics of SQL cursors. You see the first 20 pages, with a "next" arrow to go beyond them; and then it just starts counting up, and up, and up...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#537

Post by specialist » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #186

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 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…

This is a very Donald Norman idea.

With examples given like curb cuts for wheelchairs helping everyone, and OXO brand kitchen utensils meant for impaired hands just being better for everyone.

Better is better.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#538

Post by specialist » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

dmkolobov wrote: post #445

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’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…

Just a theory:

Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.

Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#539

Post by wnevets » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

stan_rogers wrote: post #479

wnevets wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.

No, they're not "afraid of 'breaking' the device", they simply don't have time for that shit. And there is absolutely no excuse for that shit. If you're writing the latest descendant of Myst, sure, go for it. If it's not an adventure game, there should be no essence of adventure game in the ingredients list. At all. Ever.

>No, they're not "afraid of 'breaking' the device", they simply don't have time for that shit.

When the older folks in my life tell me exactly that I take their word for it. They usually they no issue being brutally honest about other aspects of life.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#540

Post by abdullahkhalids » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

Macuyiko wrote: post #416

andi999 wrote: post #245

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,…

> Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well.

This is one reason why UI patents are not a good idea. When different platforms are forced to adopt differing UI patterns because they can't do what their competitors are doing, you get the current mess.