Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#541

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

I remember helping a friend fix his Windows 98 setup. He had accidentally choosen and confirmed a resolution that his monitor would not accept. I told him the exact set of Tab and Down and Enter presses to get to the correct element in UI.

Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#542

Post by strbean »

SilasX wrote: post #452
strbean wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the total lack of affordances for "I want to see this something from 2 years ago" in most implementations. Usually even the back end works on a "last ID" cursor system, so even savvy users can't jump back. Holding the end key for 10 minutes is not fun.

Yeah, I (perhaps because of masochism) click on links to Quora answers I see in my email digest, and it will me to the answer within an infiniscroll page. If I follow any link and click back ... the answer is gone. I have to go back to my email again and get it from there if I want to see it again. It almost seems like, beyond a very low threshold, UX gets worse as you throw more engineers at it.

> Yeah, I (perhaps because of masochism) click on links to Quora answers I see in my email digest

Hey, it's better than clicking through the Medium digest and getting your 10th consecutive "you can use a switch statement instead of a bunch of if statements" article written by someone in week 2 of their bootcamp. :(

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#543

Post by wtallis »

liability wrote: post #325
wtallis wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a good touchpad (meaning Apple) is superior to most good mice for general desktop usage. What pushes touchpads clearly ahead is when you make good use of multi-touch gestures. Using third-party tools under macOS, about half of my most commonly used keyboard shortcuts can be replaced by gestures that are quicker and easier than reaching for the keyboard. The handful of apps with native multitouch and suppo…

I do like and use multi-touch gestures a lot, though I think 'hot corners' and additional mouse buttons could probably fill the same roll for me. My intellimouse (P/N X08-70385) has five buttons and in the past I've mapped those two extras to forward/backward browser commands and it worked pretty well. If you can get your hands on an intellimouse, I highly recommend it; mine is somewhere around 15-20 years old with y…

Forward and back is just the tip of the iceberg. I also have gestures for switching between tabs (sending Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab to applications), closing and un-closing tabs, opening a new tab, middle clicking, refreshing a page, scrolling to the top or bottom of the page, maximizing a window. And that's on top of the gestures provided natively by macOS.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#544

Post by dmkolobov »

specialist wrote: post #538
dmkolobov wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not learning new things that's necessarily bothersome to me. The problem is that it often feels arbitrary, and I can be sure that I'll have to re-learn all of that again in six months.

As @strogonoff pointed out elsewhere, there exist domains and niches where a complex and different UI is warranted. Scientific and creative software, for instance, falls into this category. Most software I use does not. I just want to change my account settings, or search for something without feeling lost. Personally, I'd like to see innovation in UX beyond hiding stuff, moving it around, or making it look a certain way. Whenever I see that some app I use has "revolutionized" their UI, the changes usually make me think of this:

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#545

Post by danso »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #499
baggy_trough wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Siri is like working in boxing gloves that randomly smash you in the face. It's trained me to avoid it at all costs.

I use Google Assistant for the only thing it's good for: setting a timer. Even then, for some reason, half the time I say "ten minute timer", it hears only "ten minutes" and for some reason thinks I want it to search youtube for a video of a ten minute countdown. I mean, that's completely insane. Dear Google developers: if you decide to randomly delete a somewhat irrelevant word from a search query and you're left wi…

Yep, setting times is easily 95% of my requests to Alexa. The other 5% is either asking about the weather, or joke questions like: "how many fathoms is it to proxima centauri"

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#546

Post by apetresc »

SilasX wrote: post #371
noodlenotes wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being tech savvy can be a burden when it comes to discovering new features because you're afraid of making a "stupid" mistake. Accidentally posting to Facebook is something the tech illiterate do, not us , so why would we click a random icon when we're not sure if it will do something embarrassing? I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when 1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly e…

Yes! I've lost count of how many times I've e.g. opened Google Calendar from my current Gmail window and have it pull up the calendar on a different account with no warning that it's doing that. (If I'm not logged in on the other, it asks me to log in with no option to go to the original.) Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope th…

It's actually worse than that - the account is indicated in the URL, but it's expressed as an offset into a list of accounts in the order you signed into them!

So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#547

Post by SilasX »

l0b0 wrote: post #423

While on the subject of people creating user-hostile experiences, try disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" in Firefox. Now instead of a different set of fonts for every single website because of some misguided form-over-content design wankery I can read things with one less distraction.

I actually tried that, and it has its own downsides. Sometimes pages get icons by drawing from characters in higher codepoints, and so the icons will get randomly replaced with Greek letters and random symbols.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#548

Post by SilasX »

apetresc wrote: post #546
SilasX wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I've lost count of how many times I've e.g. opened Google Calendar from my current Gmail window and have it pull up the calendar on a different account with no warning that it's doing that. (If I'm not logged in on the other, it asks me to log in with no option to go to the original.) Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope th…

It's actually worse than that - the account is indicated in the URL, but it's expressed as an offset into a list of accounts in the order you signed into them! So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one. I would love to have b…

Interesting! I'd love to ask them what they think the U in URL stands for...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#549

Post by dmitriid »

IncRnd wrote: post #526
dmitriid wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, it seems like you are playing a game. Did you perform a search of tools that can test ui? There are lots of them. It would'be been so easy to just answer the question I asked. Instead, it's now a thread of non-answers and thinly veiled ad-hominem attacks. The rest of your long answer is once again working hard on avoiding the answer. > I find it hard to believe that you think there aren't any. I didn't sa…

Except that I did answer as to specific toolkits - with two answers for two separate kits. You used a lot of words to make it seem otherwise. As you yourself wrote, "Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?"

> Except that I did answer as to specific toolkits - with two answers for two separate kits

You din't, really. On the third attempt you said "I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use" and "various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools"

This shows that you started this entire argument with very bad faith. You berated me for not knowing something while you yourself:

- don't do frontend testing using frontend testing tools

- you don't know what tools your testers use

- you assume some capability of some tools only because "you talked to people familiar with them" which further shows that you yourself are not familiar with them.

On the other hand, unlike you, I know what I'm talking about. Granted, I haven't used these tools extensively, but I did use them, and I'm well aware of their limitations.

All you have is, well, empty words.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#550

Post by ricardobeat »

reaperducer wrote: post #189
IncRnd wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several online cross-platform browser testing services. You don't even need a non-mac yourself. If the company is large enough to alwayus test locally, most modern testers will use VMs or some sort of containerization for repeatable determinism. This is absolutely a solved problem.

Online isn't real-life. You can test in a VM, but it will never be the same as testing on actual hardware. Even my craptastic company gives me a bunch of devices to test on. And I very deliberately specify very low-end versions of the machines so that I can test against worst-case-scenarios. It's a bonus that sub-optimal hardware is cheap as chips. My favorite testing device is a $20 burner phone I picked up in the s…

> Online isn't real-life. You can test in a VM, but it will never be the same as testing on actual hardware.

Testing platforms like SauceLabs, Browserstack etc run on real hardware, even for mobile.

Testing with your own devices is of course better, but a lot more work. Which one you choose doesn't really matter, the point is just that you don't _need_ to have all those resources to do basic compatibility testing, so no excuses.

Post reply on HN