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> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their

by smoe 6y ago

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base Maybe I don't understand completely what he is referring to, but on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold. Scrollbars used to be sometimes useful to get a sense of how much content there is. But everyone using infinite scroll broke that, not apple.

inetknght 6y ago
> on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. I very much disagree. On all of the mobile devices I've used it has never been clear that scrolling is a thing unless there's a scrollbar. I didn't even know you could "pull down" menus or pull up some app status thing until I called support and asked how to close background apps or turn off wifi
- vidanay 6y ago
  Modern UI is a seething cauldron of non-intuitiveness and undiscoverability.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      > With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). Or using a PDA-like UI with miniaturized desktop UI elements, but that style requires a stylus to use which is why the simpler, chunkier smartphone touch UIs became popular in the first place.
simonw 6y ago
Mobile touch screens aren't really the issue here - the problem is mouse users on laptops, where they don't get to touch the screen to discover elements and they need to be able to interact with a visible scrollbar in order to scroll. I'm not a mouse user so this issue caught me completely off guard!
- zozbot234 6y ago
  I don't exactly like invisible scrollbars either (and it sucks that Gtk+3/Adwaita has adopted thin/invisible scrollbars in Linux) but modern mice have dedicated scroll wheels.
- neolog 6y ago
  > I'm not a mouse user I'm curious about what tools you use to manage mouseless workflow?
  - simonw 6y ago
    Mac laptop trackpad - where double finger scrolling feels so natural to me I forgot that it could be harder with a mouse.
    - mercurysmessage 6y ago
      So you don't use a monitor either?
      - mercurysmessage 6y ago
        This site is way too fickle
  - andylynch 6y ago
    Probably a trackpad? They are ok with his kind of scrolling but mice are tricky, especially for horizontal movement
    - 6y ago
root670 6y ago
Messed up a college entrance exam form once that used a small <textarea> with several lines requiring a response. Thought there was only 2 or 3 questions when the remaining 5 or so were out of view. Without the scroll bar I had no way of knowing I wasn't viewing the entirety of the element. An example of bad form design, but still.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  Wouldn't a "submit" button be located at the bottom of the form? In which case, in order to submit the form you would scroll down until you see the button, and would therefore have scrolled past all the fields? It sounds like the form itself had a lot of problems. Either there wasn't enough contrast on the fields to know they existed, or the submit button was located above fields that needed to be saved, which is an inexcusable interface design choice. Also one could argue that there should be form validation as well to alert the user of critical unfilled form fields. Then again, we can't rule out simple user error. I don't know, it just sounds like a lot of stuff was going on here. I doubt a scroll bar on the side of the webpage would be the critical element that solved all of the problems. I have no problem criticizing Apple, but its hard to put the responsibility of the entire internets' usability problems solely onto their shoulders.
  - root670 6y ago
    The whole editable portion of the form was just a list of questions in a single <textarea> (you'd give your response under each one). Below the <textarea> was a submit button, so it was unclear that more text was in that element than was immediately shown. Obviously they should have created a proper form with separate inputs for each question.
nprescott 6y ago
As a specific example I routinely ran into forms that rendered like this (hidden scrollbars in three different browsers concealing content, though Safari rendered _just_ enough text that it might indicate there was more to see): https://nprescott.com/public/no-scroll-bars.png https://nprescott.com/public/no-scroll-bars.png In this specific case it is probably obvious enough that hey maybe I need to try scrolling randomly to find "baccalaureate" but the particular form that drove me to capture the above was littered with similar cases where it wasn't at all obvious. More than anything though the invisible scrollbars just meant I had to second guess every single form I ever submitted.
- smoe 6y ago
  Ok, I haven’t thought of this inline case since I haven’t seen it in a while. But to be honest I’m not sure I would have noticed the scroll bars if those were full width elements. Personally I’d prefer some other visual indicator at the bottom of a cut off element or page.
userbinator 6y ago
A modern smartphone has a much higher screen resolution than a typical desktop PC of the 90s. Yet you can't spare the few pixels needed for a scroll indicator, while the page content itself is full of useless whitespace like it often is?
- zepto 6y ago
  The scrollbar is useless and distracting if you aren’t using a mouse.
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    [Citation Needed] The scrollbar is the only way to scrub/seek through a large page's content efficiently.
    - zepto 6y ago
      No citation needed - the scrollbar appears automatically when you need it.
      - ShroudedNight 6y ago
        I routinely need to do this using interfaces that aren't driven by a mouse. On my phone, for instance, where despite having inertial scrolling, it's strain inducing to repeatedly flick through pages with large quantities of content.
        zepto 6y ago
        I’m assuming you use Android. On iOS the scrollbar is only invisible when you aren’t scrolling. Whether it’s visible or not, you can drag it with directly with your finger just like dragging desktop scrollbar. No need to induce any strain. The same is true on the Mac. This entire issue is only about the default at rest behavior. Scrollsbars are visible during scrolling, and if you want them the whole time, that’s a setting.
- 6y ago
stjohnswarts 6y ago
It makes sense on mobile, it doesn't really make very much sense on desktop. At least there's an option to make them always visible. One of the first things I do when I get on an apple machine. Along with turning off all the autocorrect junk in textedit.
WorldMaker 6y ago
> It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold. I feel like the big argument here is that it is often not clear. Maybe a scroll bar "wastes" too much space, but watching mobile device users you can sort of see there needs to be some sort of system-wide scroll indicator. A lot of mobile users have nervous habits/tics of randomly scrolling every screen of every application they use. It doesn't waste a lot of time in a day, but it makes everyone look nervous or mentally ill and it's a bunch of papercuts better interface design could solve. When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. A lot of people found that aesthetically displeasing for whatever reasons, but it certainly was a good scroll indicator. Even mobile devices could use something to avoid the "random swipe syndrome" that seems to plague mobile users.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. And that was good advice. Because whenever there's a thread on Apple and scrollbars on the Internet, I can find someone telling a story of how they never knew some app was scrollable, because the grid aligned perfectly with their iPhone/iPad viewport.
- smoe 6y ago
  I guess it depends quite a bit on usage types. I don’t use many web apps, don’t visit many product and landing pages. Probably 90% of the sites I visit on mobile are news sites, blogs, recipes and similar, all of which usually fulfill the basic assumption that there is more content than what fits on screen. Top of my head I can’t actually remember having recently visited a site that had all there is on a single screen.
titzer 6y ago
Phones and tablets have had a extremely negative effect on desktop GUIs. Just an example: AMD's website. I wanted to price and compare some desktop CPUs and their site is just atrocious. Huge, pretty spreads with zero information on them that you must scroll past. Twelve different marketing takes, each a huge chip that begs to distract...please click ME...on something or other irrelevant...and finally...finally at the bottom, a cartoonish over-sized table with a massive font.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  Strangely enough, a lot of computer hardware websites are really horrible. Ever gone to motherboard/RAM/etc manufacturer websites? Unmitigated disaster. Is this the same ram stick model? Why are there 3 million variations and no explanation of the distinction between them? How is it that there are 5 different filters and none of them seem to filter for the thing you’re looking for? Why does the marketing page take me to a different sub domain for this one product, but not for the other? On and on.

by smoe 6y ago

inetknght 6y ago

> on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. I very much disagree. On all of the mobile devices I've used it has never been clear that scrolling is a thing unless there's a scrollbar. I didn't even know you could "pull down" menus or pull up some app status thing until I called support and asked how to close background apps or turn off wifi

vidanay 6y ago
Modern UI is a seething cauldron of non-intuitiveness and undiscoverability.
- notriddle 6y ago
  With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    > With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). Or using a PDA-like UI with miniaturized desktop UI elements, but that style requires a stylus to use which is why the simpler, chunkier smartphone touch UIs became popular in the first place.

simonw 6y ago

Mobile touch screens aren't really the issue here - the problem is mouse users on laptops, where they don't get to touch the screen to discover elements and they need to be able to interact with a visible scrollbar in order to scroll. I'm not a mouse user so this issue caught me completely off guard!

zozbot234 6y ago
I don't exactly like invisible scrollbars either (and it sucks that Gtk+3/Adwaita has adopted thin/invisible scrollbars in Linux) but modern mice have dedicated scroll wheels.
neolog 6y ago
> I'm not a mouse user I'm curious about what tools you use to manage mouseless workflow?
- simonw 6y ago
  Mac laptop trackpad - where double finger scrolling feels so natural to me I forgot that it could be harder with a mouse.
  - mercurysmessage 6y ago
    So you don't use a monitor either?
    - mercurysmessage 6y ago
      This site is way too fickle
- andylynch 6y ago
  Probably a trackpad? They are ok with his kind of scrolling but mice are tricky, especially for horizontal movement
  - 6y ago

root670 6y ago

Messed up a college entrance exam form once that used a small <textarea> with several lines requiring a response. Thought there was only 2 or 3 questions when the remaining 5 or so were out of view. Without the scroll bar I had no way of knowing I wasn't viewing the entirety of the element. An example of bad form design, but still.

jacurtis 6y ago
Wouldn't a "submit" button be located at the bottom of the form? In which case, in order to submit the form you would scroll down until you see the button, and would therefore have scrolled past all the fields? It sounds like the form itself had a lot of problems. Either there wasn't enough contrast on the fields to know they existed, or the submit button was located above fields that needed to be saved, which is an inexcusable interface design choice. Also one could argue that there should be form validation as well to alert the user of critical unfilled form fields. Then again, we can't rule out simple user error. I don't know, it just sounds like a lot of stuff was going on here. I doubt a scroll bar on the side of the webpage would be the critical element that solved all of the problems. I have no problem criticizing Apple, but its hard to put the responsibility of the entire internets' usability problems solely onto their shoulders.
- root670 6y ago
  The whole editable portion of the form was just a list of questions in a single <textarea> (you'd give your response under each one). Below the <textarea> was a submit button, so it was unclear that more text was in that element than was immediately shown. Obviously they should have created a proper form with separate inputs for each question.

nprescott 6y ago

As a specific example I routinely ran into forms that rendered like this (hidden scrollbars in three different browsers concealing content, though Safari rendered _just_ enough text that it might indicate there was more to see): https://nprescott.com/public/no-scroll-bars.png https://nprescott.com/public/no-scroll-bars.png In this specific case it is probably obvious enough that hey maybe I need to try scrolling randomly to find "baccalaureate" but the particular form that drove me to capture the above was littered with similar cases where it wasn't at all obvious. More than anything though the invisible scrollbars just meant I had to second guess every single form I ever submitted.

smoe 6y ago
Ok, I haven’t thought of this inline case since I haven’t seen it in a while. But to be honest I’m not sure I would have noticed the scroll bars if those were full width elements. Personally I’d prefer some other visual indicator at the bottom of a cut off element or page.

userbinator 6y ago

A modern smartphone has a much higher screen resolution than a typical desktop PC of the 90s. Yet you can't spare the few pixels needed for a scroll indicator, while the page content itself is full of useless whitespace like it often is?

zepto 6y ago
The scrollbar is useless and distracting if you aren’t using a mouse.
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  [Citation Needed] The scrollbar is the only way to scrub/seek through a large page's content efficiently.
  - zepto 6y ago
    No citation needed - the scrollbar appears automatically when you need it.
    - ShroudedNight 6y ago
      I routinely need to do this using interfaces that aren't driven by a mouse. On my phone, for instance, where despite having inertial scrolling, it's strain inducing to repeatedly flick through pages with large quantities of content.
      - zepto 6y ago
        I’m assuming you use Android. On iOS the scrollbar is only invisible when you aren’t scrolling. Whether it’s visible or not, you can drag it with directly with your finger just like dragging desktop scrollbar. No need to induce any strain. The same is true on the Mac. This entire issue is only about the default at rest behavior. Scrollsbars are visible during scrolling, and if you want them the whole time, that’s a setting.
6y ago

stjohnswarts 6y ago

It makes sense on mobile, it doesn't really make very much sense on desktop. At least there's an option to make them always visible. One of the first things I do when I get on an apple machine. Along with turning off all the autocorrect junk in textedit.

WorldMaker 6y ago

> It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold. I feel like the big argument here is that it is often not clear. Maybe a scroll bar "wastes" too much space, but watching mobile device users you can sort of see there needs to be some sort of system-wide scroll indicator. A lot of mobile users have nervous habits/tics of randomly scrolling every screen of every application they use. It doesn't waste a lot of time in a day, but it makes everyone look nervous or mentally ill and it's a bunch of papercuts better interface design could solve. When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. A lot of people found that aesthetically displeasing for whatever reasons, but it certainly was a good scroll indicator. Even mobile devices could use something to avoid the "random swipe syndrome" that seems to plague mobile users.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. And that was good advice. Because whenever there's a thread on Apple and scrollbars on the Internet, I can find someone telling a story of how they never knew some app was scrollable, because the grid aligned perfectly with their iPhone/iPad viewport.
smoe 6y ago
I guess it depends quite a bit on usage types. I don’t use many web apps, don’t visit many product and landing pages. Probably 90% of the sites I visit on mobile are news sites, blogs, recipes and similar, all of which usually fulfill the basic assumption that there is more content than what fits on screen. Top of my head I can’t actually remember having recently visited a site that had all there is on a single screen.

titzer 6y ago

Phones and tablets have had a extremely negative effect on desktop GUIs. Just an example: AMD's website. I wanted to price and compare some desktop CPUs and their site is just atrocious. Huge, pretty spreads with zero information on them that you must scroll past. Twelve different marketing takes, each a huge chip that begs to distract...please click ME...on something or other irrelevant...and finally...finally at the bottom, a cartoonish over-sized table with a massive font.

FridgeSeal 6y ago
Strangely enough, a lot of computer hardware websites are really horrible. Ever gone to motherboard/RAM/etc manufacturer websites? Unmitigated disaster. Is this the same ram stick model? Why are there 3 million variations and no explanation of the distinction between them? How is it that there are 5 different filters and none of them seem to filter for the thing you’re looking for? Why does the marketing page take me to a different sub domain for this one product, but not for the other? On and on.