6 ms·

> 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

> 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 ago
I'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 ago
  This 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 ago
There 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.
- acdha 10y ago
  Can you provide more details about what you're talking about?
  - mozumder 10y ago
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790 We could remove 90% of custom scrollbar javascript if this was fixed.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Have you (or anyone else) offered a patch? Skimming that bugzilla page, it looks like in 15 years nobody has cared enough to even submit a patch.
      - vog 10y ago
        It seems there's only a small overlap between the people suffering and the people being able to solve this. If a "normal" web developer struggles with that, they can provide JavaScript workarounds, perhaps many, but they usually aren't that intimate with C/C++ and the whole framework on which Firefox is based. Also, as with most projects, if a webdev can solve this problem with a workaround now, they don't invest time to provide a proper long-term solution. If if they are capable of improving Firefox, they'd still need to create the JS workaround, because short-term is what they are paid for.
    - gkya 10y ago
      Maybe fix it then? Or better yet, don't fiddle with users' UI items. The scrollbar is the same everywhere on my desktop, why fiddle with a thing that the user's really used to?
      - aidos 10y ago
        Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific? Also, because you want your design to work nicely irrespective of the browser and scrollbars and dropdowns make that really hard. It sucks, but there's a reason that people choose to try to replace these elements (unfortunately, with mixed results). For future reference, you can actually get rid of nasty scrollbars without ruining the normal scroll behaviour by having an outer div(overflow:hidden, width:x) containing the content div(width:x+scrollbar-width).
        E6300 10y ago
        > Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific? Where do you draw the line, though? The scrollbar is not part of the website, it's part of the window where the website is being rendered, and the window is itself part of a desktop environment. Would you try to override the look and feel of the desktop environment if you could?
- yoasif_ 10y ago
  The solution here is simple -- lobby W3C to include custom scrollbar colors in the CSS specs, then call out Mozilla for not following the standards. As it is, colored scrollbars are not part of any standard, so asking for them are like asking Google or Mozilla to support ActiveX for your webapp -- if you rely on non-standard, proprietary features, you're locked in to your non-standard browser.

iMark 10y ago

I'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 ago
This 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 ago

There 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.

acdha 10y ago
Can you provide more details about what you're talking about?
- mozumder 10y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790 We could remove 90% of custom scrollbar javascript if this was fixed.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Have you (or anyone else) offered a patch? Skimming that bugzilla page, it looks like in 15 years nobody has cared enough to even submit a patch.
    - vog 10y ago
      It seems there's only a small overlap between the people suffering and the people being able to solve this. If a "normal" web developer struggles with that, they can provide JavaScript workarounds, perhaps many, but they usually aren't that intimate with C/C++ and the whole framework on which Firefox is based. Also, as with most projects, if a webdev can solve this problem with a workaround now, they don't invest time to provide a proper long-term solution. If if they are capable of improving Firefox, they'd still need to create the JS workaround, because short-term is what they are paid for.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Maybe fix it then? Or better yet, don't fiddle with users' UI items. The scrollbar is the same everywhere on my desktop, why fiddle with a thing that the user's really used to?
    - aidos 10y ago
      Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific? Also, because you want your design to work nicely irrespective of the browser and scrollbars and dropdowns make that really hard. It sucks, but there's a reason that people choose to try to replace these elements (unfortunately, with mixed results). For future reference, you can actually get rid of nasty scrollbars without ruining the normal scroll behaviour by having an outer div(overflow:hidden, width:x) containing the content div(width:x+scrollbar-width).
      - E6300 10y ago
        > Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific? Where do you draw the line, though? The scrollbar is not part of the website, it's part of the window where the website is being rendered, and the window is itself part of a desktop environment. Would you try to override the look and feel of the desktop environment if you could?
yoasif_ 10y ago
The solution here is simple -- lobby W3C to include custom scrollbar colors in the CSS specs, then call out Mozilla for not following the standards. As it is, colored scrollbars are not part of any standard, so asking for them are like asking Google or Mozilla to support ActiveX for your webapp -- if you rely on non-standard, proprietary features, you're locked in to your non-standard browser.