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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

571–575 of 575 posts

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it. Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it. I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become mo…

> so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time: (I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.) As a kid first discovering computers…

Ah, I see. That's a fair point! I hadn't considered the difficulty of language choice when it comes to non-US computer users. Thank you for sharing your experience!

But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it.

But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both monitors on my desk have a single button on the back side of the bottom right corner. The button can be pressed or pushed in each of the four cardinal directions (left, up, right, bottom). It's actually really nice. Since it's only one physical button, there's never any guessing which button you're on. And once you know the menu structure, common tasks can be done completely blind. (For example, I know that swit…

What model?

Samsung U28E590D and Philips BDM4065UC.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#573
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That excuse doesn't work at all, and you even provided the counterexample yourself. If you know the data fits on one screen, which you know very quickly , skip the scrollbar. If you don't know, add one. All you need from API is an indication of whether you're already at the end, which you probably already have so you can know whether you can/should call again. You might not know the precise number of results to size…

I’m not in infra or apps; I’m a database engineer. I write ETL pipelines. If you know you have one more result, that is necessarily because your data pipeline actually has that result available for it to count; i.e. the result record/tuple has been loaded into the database’s memory, and the database has determined that that record/tuple is valid and fresh. (And at that point, rather than counting, the DB may as well…

> I write ETL pipelines.

"Apps" to folks in storage (like myself), networking, OS, etc.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

Very belated followup. Apologies.

That's a pretty good rant. Very Donald Norman. Know that I mostly hate rants about UI, ergonomics, design.

The follow up is pretty good too.

I've long had some notions about incorporating haptic and tactile stuff (I'm not saying "feedback") into the communication channels. Alas, I've never had the gumption to execute.

One very old notion was adding physical feedback into the mouse. A clicker/knocker, so the mouse would feel like it was passing over a bump. And one of those whirly things to make the mouse buzz.

Someone's actually done the physical part. But I don't think anyone has integrated it into the UI/UX.

Certainly nothing as sophisticated as Apple's trackpad.

Any way. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#575
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :(

Update: Since I made this comment, I have gotten a "don't use if/else" article on my Medium digest... every single day.
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