23 ms·

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). Discov

• soco 6y ago
  Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar... As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    It's not just about 1% of screenspace, it's about visual pollution that is distracting, it increase cognitive noise and cognitive noise is cancer
    • bobbyT314 6y ago
      Giving the user clear feedback about where they are in a page and how to modify their location should not "increase cognitive noise". It should in fact offload cognitive load from the user onto the interface leaving more room, so to speak, for the user to use for themselves.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays My computer is an 11-inch MacBook Air. That means that even if I run Safari full-screen, which is inconvenient, I have only 680 vertical pixels for content. It's amazing how many web sites I run into that throw up fixed-position pop-ups that are bigger than that, and I can't close them or scroll to see their content because the designers or middle managers decided that every person on the planet is rocking a 27-inch 5K display. Usually I just close the window and never visit the site again. If it's important, I break out the dev tools and start invoking display:none until I hit the right element.
  • SCNP 6y ago
    If I might ask, what are you using for vertical tabs? I haven't found a good add-on that shows the tabs on the side and also hides the tabs on the top.
    • avhon1 6y ago
      Firefox Quantum made it so that extensions can't hide the tabs on top. It can only be done manually, by making and editing a userChrome.css file. https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-tabstrip-in-firefox-57-quantum https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...
      • SCNP 6y ago
        Awesome! Thanks!
• scaryclam 6y ago
  Here's a link for something I use on such news and blog sites: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ I works a surprising amount of the time!
  • jemorya 6y ago
    I use this every single day on my locked-down work laptop. It fixes so many sites! I recommend it as often as I can, and I'm surprised that its use is not more widespread.
    • jonpurdy 6y ago
      Very happy to have seen this! I like that Alisdair uses a sticky header on the page to verify that it works.
  • BruiseLee 6y ago
    Wow, thanks! I've been using "nuke anything" extension to manually remove this crap, but this solution looks much more convenient.
  • Voliokis 6y ago
    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?
    • DreadY2K 6y ago
      Firefox has a bookmarks sidebar that pops up if you press Ctrl+B (or buried inside the hamburger menu, but Ctrl+B is the easiest way to access it). You can put the bookmark in there, and then only open the bookmarks menu when you want to access it.
    • JadeNB 6y ago
      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.
• site-packages1 6y ago
  I've been super annoyed by trying to grab the scroll thing on the bar in a super long pdf. It keeps disappearing and on long PDFs where I want to scroll to, say, the middle, it disappears before I can precisely grab it. It's maddening sometimes.
  • namank 6y ago
    I resort to the down key to make the scrollbar appear without losing my position in the doc. In fact, in Preview, my default workflow is to click on the main content panel as soon as the doc open; else the down key might take me to the next page, which defeats the purpose.
    • armandhammer 6y ago
      Why don't you just turn the scrollbars on permanently in System Preferences? It's under General > Show scroll bars always.
• ManskY 6y ago
  There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge. There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
  • sitkack 6y ago
    Please don't blame people for wanting when it is "the design" department that forces these changes on people. How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst. Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.
    • Kalium 6y ago
      I think we may be seeing an organizational issue at work. The job of a design department is to produce design. If there isn't enough new stuff to design, they will redesign old stuff. This serves to advance the critical goal to the design department of justifying their continued existence. The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small. You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.
      • shaan7 6y ago
        Combine that with the needs of designers to "make the experience unique" to a level where consistency goes out of the window. Every commercial software these days has its own idea of design and it gets irritatingly hard to learn a new set of usage pattern for each. Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline of work so it is very hard for me to imagine otherwise)
• reaperducer 6y ago
  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 ever think to look for it. Who thought that was a good idea? 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.
  • frereubu 6y ago
    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 occasionally stumped by things like how to turn on repeat in Apple Music on my phone.
    • andi999 6y ago
      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.
      • toastal 6y ago
        Speaking of Android, I used my phone as a hotspot for over a year. When I dropped my phone and the screen broke, while I waited for a replacement screen to DIY, I was able to use ADB to navigate to the assistive tools that would screen read. With that I was able to toggle on and off some settings relade to keeping the hotspot on and churning. Accessibility can help normal people in extraordinary situations too.
      • pvorb 6y ago
• derefr 6y ago
  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 desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation. (Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.) What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps. As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't. IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious? > I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
• asciimov 6y ago
  > For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features. I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability. Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display is off, long press is Siri.)
  • syspec 6y ago
    Double press
    • asciimov 6y ago
      I could have sworn it would only do it for triple press, but no, it seems to work now with only two. Thanks for the info.
      • mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Configurable in settings.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    Good games are pretty good at discoverability like this. I remember playing GTA IV or V and if I hadn't been using some skill, it surfaces tips. Apple has to be slightly more careful because it can't just spam you with "Double-tap to Apple Pay," but recognizing that you just used Apple Pay, but you unlocked you phone and did it from Wallet might mean there's a new skill they can show you.
    • asciimov 6y ago
      I was thinking about this as I recently started playing "Ultimate NES Remix" They are quick mini-games made from old nes games. These quick little mini-games really make good tutorials on how to actually play the real game they are taken.
  • 6y ago
• II2II 6y ago
  The first thing I thought of while reading your comment were graphical adventure games, where you pretty much had to click on everything to see what did something. The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you! Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
• dehrmann 6y ago
  One time, I thought I was going crazy because I could see a file with ls, but it wasn't in my Finder window. The problem was the hidden scrollbars, and the file was outside the window. I changed the setting to Mac OS always shows scroll bars, but I have no idea how someone thought hiding them was a good idea.
• WorldMaker 6y ago
  I have this complaint about iOS all the time that often the "clean look" in iOS leads to grids that exactly match the available viewport and without scrollbars you have no idea if there is more to scroll without idly swiping things around. I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or panel around just to figure out the boundaries. One of the things I thought was brilliant about early Windows 8-era "metro" design: it was the only era Windows briefly experimented with going scrollbar free (it went back to scrollbar "light" soon after) and when they did so they absolutely made sure that the application grids never lined up with viewport. If there was something to scroll, it would stick out a bit, always that little hint that there was something more further down or right. It got some flak, especially from macOS design fans, for not being "clean enough", but you'd have apps with no visible scrollbar and you knew whether or not there was anything to scroll just looking at them. You didn't have to squiggle your finger around (or fiddle with the scroll wheel) to check.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    Oh so I'm not alone (iOS user here). There have been parts of UIs I have totally failed to notice because I didn't realise you could scroll, because it didn't look like anything was beyond the screen.
• rriepe 6y ago
  > for what, a "clean" look? It's to stop the offset shift. Pages with scrollbars and pages without have different document widths but the same viewport width. When you click between the two, the page "shifts" half a scrollbar width if it's centered. To fix this, Apple made the scrollbar an overlay. That stops the shifting. But then everything on any page with a scrollbar looks off-center. To fix that, Apple made it disappear when it's not being used.
• iforgotpassword 6y ago
  It's funny how when the world ran at 640x480 we had scroll bars, separators and buttons with 3D effects, but nowadays with higher resolutions and bigger screens designers strive for the ultimate clean design. Hidden elements that appear when certain gestures are performed, flat buttons that are indistinguishable from labels/text with a colored background, borders and separators get removed or turned into barely visible thin lines.
• silverwings 6y ago
  > For anyone (cough, elderly parents) For a long time, I have belived that these were problems that the elderly somehow could not figure out. I blamed it on them for a long time. Then I opened Adobe After Effects for the first time and it suddenly made sense to me, the UI I found intuitive was just years of practice. How is an x in a corner a close button? What's so intuitive about swiping up to see a menu?
• sizzle 6y ago
  Reminded me of this great piece by Don Norman on Apple's undoing of design as of recent: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi... "Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended. No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist. The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage."
  • Xenoamorphous 6y ago
    When my girlfriend got an iMac I spent a minute or two trying to find the power button. I think it’s a good example of form over function. You can’t even turn the damn thing on.
  • dahauns 6y ago
    The part about recovery and the lack of a universal undo/back function and instead offloading it to the developer, resulting in an inconsistent mess really drives the point home. What's most telling is how even Apple often does an astonishingly bad job at it - it really sets the precedent regarding diminished importance. As an exercise: Browse the App Store for a while and count the number of different ways it implements "go back one step".
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  Discoverability is also a fascinating challenge for those home voice-control devices. What exactly can an Alexa do? Did it get any new features recently? Who could say? You could may be get an email telling you about its cool new ability to rename timers or something, but other than explicitly reading about the new features in a manual or newsletter, how would you possibly think to ask? I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.
• breakfastduck 6y ago
  It’s so strange to me to read these kind of comments, and to even see this article. I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen. It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see! No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)
  • iforgotpassword 6y ago
    > how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see! Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability? Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop some kind of swipe tic where they instinctively try to scroll around on every screen that opens. Would be a pretty sad testimony to this UI concept.
    • mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Yep. "Why get my bearings at a glance when I could miss things and/or wonder and poll the machine about it instead?" :D There are subtler themes for scrollbars as well so that they don't have to stand out.
    • breakfastduck 6y ago
      Why should you? Because some things are scrollable and it’s usually fairly obvious if there’s going to be more content. If it’s not clear to you, I totally get why you think that. But I don’t suffer the same issue. Why should I have to have scrolbars plastered all over the show to tell me that something is scrollable when I can check it myself in less than a second? I understand why people disagree - why is it so hard for you to understand that I disagree? Generally it feels like the pro scroll bar opinion is actually quite aggressive, needlessly so.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  So just a couple of days ago I decided to revamp my VPS VM host. I ended up putting Ubuntu on a VM. So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things. I open a window, and decide I need to resize it. There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it. I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this. I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.
  • boogies 6y ago
    This is how my WM (dwm) works (except I patched it to use Super instead of Alt), and it’s a better way of resizing (not requiring such finicky mouse placement). But that is really weird to hear XFCE doesn’t allow both methods like JWM (and I would have assumed, any WM not aimed at relatively extreme minimalists and power users), I wonder if it’s a bug.
    • tta_8363075 6y ago
      > But that is really weird to hear XFCE doesn’t allow both methods Don't blame Xfce for that but Ubuntu. For some reason they decided to make the resize area 1 pixel wide. It's specific to recent versions of Ubuntu. It worked fine on LTS 16 (or was it 14?) and on Debian.
• jiveturkey 6y ago
  > Even I was stumped Even you? Wow! But srsly, that's not a snide comment but rather a hint that your personal sensibility may not reflect broad sensibilities. And of course, there may not even be a single broad sensibility -- look at the political parties in the US, both the major divisions and the subdivisions within each. Sometimes, the maker of something has to make a design choice consistent with their [market success proven] direction. > I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed. When I'm on my laptop, I do. Every inch of vertical space is precious. On my display monitor, not so much, but having the buttons reveal rather than permanent doesn't detract in the slightest.
• CarbyAu 6y ago
  Simple Windows Prank: - select non-maxmised open window - keyboard shortcut Alt+Space. Then M. to move. - use arrow keys to move windows offscreen, say to the right. Don't touch the mouse! - Hit Enter key to confirm position. From now on. Anything but "full maximise from the taskbar" makes the window "disappear" without a trace. "Restore" from the taskbar doesn't help. And assuming you even know exactly happened, you still have to guess which direction they took the window and how far... How is it there is no "Position Reset to 0,0" option?
  • saratogacx 6y ago
    There are several ways to fix this without needing to be aware of the window's off screen position. - From the keyboard WIN+{Left|Right} resizes and pins the window to the side of the screen - From the keyboard WIN+Up to maximize the window (or right click on the task bar and select maximize. Now, drag the title bar from the top and the window will unpin from the screen and move with the mouse - Right click on the task bar and choose any of the windows arrangement options (Stack, tile, cascade)
• swiley 6y ago
  GUIs used to be discoverable and intuitive. Now they make bash and git look user friendly.
  • tuatoru 6y ago
    This somehow seems like a variation on Zawinski's Law. "Every UI evolves into something that makes its users confused, hesitant and angry", perhaps.