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I wish people who made webpages trusted browsers to scroll. The number of sites that play with the scroll speed and consistency by hijacking scroll events makes
by afandian 10y ago
I wish people who made webpages trusted browsers to scroll. The number of sites that play with the scroll speed and consistency by hijacking scroll events makes me doubt whether the designers spare a passing thought for usability.
Scrolling is one of those things that (in my opinion) get calibrated in the brain for hand-eye co-ordination. Which is why (again IMHO) there are religious wars fought over, for example, Apple's trackpads. This stuff is important. It can be a jarring experience when scrolling suddenly doesn't work. Flip side is, I'm sure some people don't care.
There's nothing more annoying than a web designer saying "I know better than you" and re-implementing features. Because they're usually wrong.
EDIT: Would people accept it if each webpage re-adjusted your mouse pointer speed and acceleration? Is there any difference between one mouse function and another? Why do web designers think they have the right?
- DiThi 10y agoI wish the same thing, but for desktop applications too. There are some that implement their own scroll and it's the most annoying thing ever, because it makes the scroll bar unusable. As the article point out, it's vastly different than scroll wheel, touch and keys. Scroll bars provides 3 different scroll methods: - Click and drag scroll thingy. The most used method, but sometimes misunderstood. It should scroll only as much as you moved the mouse. It wreaks havoc with endless scroll pages. - Click on the bar outside the thingy. This used to be equivalent to pgdown/pgup. It was the method I used the most, and I was infuriated countless times when it behave differently: on some platforms it means "go here". - Arrow buttons. Not very useful and virtually extinct at this point.
- mariusmg 10y agoYou forgot Space key which is by far the best way when reading long texts.
- afandian 10y agoAgreed. I have a great Apple mouse and trackpad. But I still use space when scrolling. Lots of know-it-all web developers hijack scrolling and unsurprisingly don't know that you can scroll with space. The OS developers have thought about accessibility.
- pimlottc 10y agoNear-ubiquitous floating headers (and even footers) have made full-page spacebar scrolling practically useless on most pages for me now, at least under Chrome on OSX. You always have to scroll back a little bit to see a line or two of content.
- meej 10y agoThis bookmarklet helps a lot with this: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ What's frustrating is that this is a solvable problem. I've seen sites that have fixed it, and fixed it well. But they are vanishingly rare. So I will just keep killing their sticky headers and footers...
- pimlottc 10y agoYou're right, some sites manage to do it without breaking full page scrolling. One of these days I'd like to sit down and figure out the specifics (of both right and wrong ways) and write a good comprehensive medium post with clear instructions on doing persistent headers correctly. Of course if someone else beats me to it, that's fine too...
- boomlinde 10y agoThe space key is not part of the scroll bar, so in the context of listing ways that a scroll bar can be used it wasn't forgotten but simply left out.
- myfonj 10y ago- Click and hold outside the thingy usually performs consecutive page jumps to the point (Firefox, Chrome) Few omitted means to scroll - hold middle mouse button and drag (this usually works well sideways and in case no scroll bar is present) - spacebar / shift+spacebar, pgUp / pgDn, home / end - and FMoPW most importantly clicking the arrows in the scroll bar. For "us" this seems almost uncomprehensible, but I regularly see users perform scolling this way. For example my wife with track pad (yes, it is capable of two finger gestures), and my mother even with mouse with scroll wheel, until recently. No wonder, discoverability of that action is way above all that abstract "dragging", "swinging" and "pressing" concepts without direct visual clue.
- binaryjason 10y agoshift+spacebar, you just changed my way scrolling on Mac keyboard
- chrisbuc 10y agoArrow buttons. I pretty much only use arrow buttons to scroll screens of text into my eyeline. I get really annoyed when arrow buttons are overloaded to tab between screen elements instead of scrolling (my online banking site, I'm looking at you!)
- DiThi 10y agoI mean the buttons in the GUI scroll bar, that have little arrows or triangles in them. They're way too small and too far apart to be used effectively. For that reason some UI toolkits had both buttons together at the bottom.
- codedokode 10y agoCustom scrollbar implementations also often ignore scrolling speed set in OS's settings.
- shultays 10y agoThere was also right clicking on bar background and clicking "scroll here" on the menu. Imagine how many times this feature is used in whole history!
- LoSboccacc 10y agomy only issue with scrolling is how the the bar looks > https://i.imgur.com/rgIbdur.png https://i.imgur.com/rgIbdur.png it comes in only one color variant, it's inconsistently looking across browser, takes a lot of space, especially for scrolling narrow elements, it has low contrast so it doesn't even do a good job accessibility wise etc. go to a site like Bulgari's and bam, custom scroller, precisely for this reason https://i.imgur.com/T3Yasht.png https://i.imgur.com/T3Yasht.png you'll notice the page scroller is untouched, because it doesn't contrast with the page style, being a browser element, but the inside page scroller would sucks. you gonna argue with them they have to design their website style to accomodate the gray slate slab of vintage scrollers?
- Jaruzel 10y agoI recently discovered how Facebook do their fade-in thin scroll elements in the messenger[1] web app. They actually size the DIVs too wide by about 20+ pixels, then they alter the z-order so that the DIV edge (where the native scrollbar is) is hidden under another DIV (or over the window bounds). Then they overlay their own scroll bar element at the new visible edge of the DIV and hook it to the div scroll event. It's one of the worst CSS kludges I have ever seen. I don't know enough about cross browser compatibility though to know if there's a better way? -- [1] https://www.messenger.com https://www.messenger.com
- taejavu 10y agoKludge it may be, but if it allows them to have custom scrollbars without replacing native scrolling, it's absolutely the lesser evil.
- Flow 10y agoI've set OS X to always show the scroll bars, and wondered why they disappear on Facebook. Their custom scroll bar looks identical to the native one. The whole thing they made feels pointless and user hostile.
- 10y ago
- anamoulous 10y ago> There's nothing more annoying than a web designer saying "I know better than you" and re-implementing features. Because they're usually wrong. It's not just that they are saying "I know better than you", they are saying they know better than HCI teams that have spent years tuning interfaces in response to actual research and testing. Most of the web and app designers I've worked with have never watched a person use their designs, much less considered their work in the context of the entire OS experience.
- iMark 10y agoI'll never forget the despair I felt when I started a new job and sat down with the designer of the site we were to be working on. She told me "Our site isn't going to work like any other website." She was right. It didn't. The whole thing was canned six months later.
- smacktoward 10y agoThis is a battle I've fought a zillion times. It's just so hard for some designers, who are used to a world where originality is a good thing, to understand that in UX originality is a liability.
- mozumder 10y agoThere are 15-year old bugs in Firefox on scrollbar designs that are fixed under Chrome/Webkit. Often times custom scrolling is used to fix that.
- jdiez17 10y agoWebpages that mess with scroll behaviour invariably annoy me as much as those that autoplay videos, open popups, etc. I just instinctively ctrl-w that shit immediately.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI've been adding them to my router firewall as DNS blackholes as well. Just for good measure
- SonicSoul 10y agoThis is a pet peeve of mine too and I agree with all your points. But I think more often than not, such custom scrolling may happen as a result of trying to control something else, like some infinite scroll with virtualization that would normally start shifting elements and make the scrollbar behave funny. not defending this pattern, I just don't think people fuck with the scrollbar just to make it "better". they probably try to make it as close to original as they can which of will of course be, nothing like the original :)
- tambourine_man 10y agoScroll highjacking can be done to avoid partial content being displayed on the screen. You know those pages with several 100% height slides? They don't look as nice if there's a bit of the previous one showing at the top or the next one at the bottom. But yeah, it sucks, we all agree with that. We need this to be done in CSS, something like body { scroll-step : 100%; } What I don't understand is scroll highjacking in something like Google AMP. It replicates the browsers default behavior, only poorly. No tap the menu bar to scroll to the top, motion sickness inducing acceleration, etc
- afandian 10y agoSurely the navigation should be decoupled from scrolling. I think this happens because people try to shoe-horn multiple pages into one page. IMHO these should be separate pages, not one page with pseudo-subpage content. You could use mouse events, or click buttons, or touch events to navigate between them. Perhaps this comes out of the hinterland between touchscreen scrolling and gesturing. What if I want to zoom in or out on the slide for reasons of accessibility?
- accountface 10y agoI agree with you — BUT, I have conducted a fair amount of user tests where someone will not scroll. It's often an older demographic, but I've seen 30 year olds fall into it as well. So it's not always a designer saying "I know better than you." I do think that they're going about solving the problem the wrong way though. Your design should on its own encourage scrolling by making it obvious that additional content exists (avoiding so-called "false floors") — it can be harder to do this than unchanging your design and suggesting scrolljacking, which is why I think we see it so often.
- afandian 10y agoI think that's a different issue. If people don't know they need to scroll (your false floor example), that's a failing of the visual language, so it's entirely appropriate to put an explicit message "you can scroll" to make up for the failure of visual language. I'm talking about what happens when you actually do scroll. In my experience those seem to the same sites that are visually confusing are the ones that re-program your scroll down as a page-down...
- retube 10y agoyeah I find any cursor hijacking to be very frustrating, and always results in a "worse" user experience. A big one is Google search results, where a down arrow increments a step through the result list, and not an immediate page scroll.
- lloeki 10y ago> trusted browsers to scroll This is especially egregious on mobile, where not only they implement scrolling badly in a way that only vaguely matches a single device/os (with terrible performance) and is completely off on others, but also feel compelled to hijack scrolling for "creative"† navigation, like swipe left/right to move across articles, which gets triggered every time you scroll downward but ever so slightly sideways. Like, I'm on a bus and actually holding the phone, so don't zap me to an unrelated article I don't care about on each encountered pothole please. † at least as creative as the number of expletives I'm thinking about every single time such an abomination of an interaction triggers.
- eloisius 10y agoWith the new AMP articles, Google News has become almost unusable to me for this reason. I used to love it, but now the experience is all janky and I constantly end up navigating to some other article instead of backwards when I use iOS' swipe back gesture.
- CaptSpify 10y ago> There's nothing more annoying than a web designer saying "I know better than you" and re-implementing features. Because they're usually wrong. This is my problem with overly designed interfaces in general. Your website is not a special snowflake. It doesn't need a new way to interact, it needs consistency with other sites.
- xorcist 10y agoDoes it matter anymore? For those of us who use the scroll bar for its intended purpose, everything broke with the single page fad. Now so much of the web doesn't scroll anymore that I've re-trained myself on the arrow keys. That mostly works, until they set keyboard focus too. Even newspapers now load some entirely different article when I've read half way through one, just in case I want to feast my eyes on something unrelated when I'm done. I'm just sitting this one out. It'll pass.
- scoates 10y agoIn case you haven't seen it (didn't notice it linked in the replies): http://codepen.io/gunderson/full/GJJPpV/ http://codepen.io/gunderson/full/GJJPpV/
- helb 10y agoSomewhat related: Chrome plugin to stop scroll hijacking – https://joshbalfour.github.io/disable-scroll-jacking/ https://joshbalfour.github.io/disable-scroll-jacking/