4 ms·

Sorry but horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps, and I'd argue that that interaction is not actually perceived as scrolling by the u

• rhn_mk1 6y ago
  > horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps Why? It seems to get the job done in spreadsheets.
  • notriddle 6y ago
    If you have both horizontal and vertical scrolling, gesture-scrolling systems (like touchscreen and two-finger trackpad) behave weirdly. It either wobbles back-and-forth, or it locks to a particular direction. Also, mice with physical scroll wheels can only scroll in one direction.
    • rhn_mk1 6y ago
      Most mice these days have wheels that can be tilted to scroll sideways. It's not perfect, but it works.
  • j-pb 6y ago
    Compare the scrolling behaviour of OPs example table, with the scrolling behaviour of Excel or Numbers. With OPs version you get immediately lost in the grid because the headers don't float along with the scrolled view, which makes this best case useless, worst case harmful (e.g. confusing important columns). If you have thousands of columns you're not going to do manual eyeballing of values anyways, you'll lose track because scrolling is not accurate enough, so you might as well represent rows as documents which densely shows the fields/columns and values, and which can then in turn be shown in a vertically scrollable list.
    • rhn_mk1 6y ago
      The problem you describe isn't horizontal scrolling, it's scrolling as implemented by OP. It also applies to vertical scrolling, as the headers don't follow around.
      • j-pb 6y ago
        Yeah, but on one dimension that's workable. On two dimensions it's useless. Having the headers float makes 2 dimensional scrolling usable but not great. Why do we store data as rows and columns? To be able to quickly compare them. Is that possible with 50 columns? No.
• simonw 6y ago
  I'm planning on adding the ability to toggle columns, but the whole goal of Datasette is that you can point it at ANY data - including some crazy government data CSV file with a hundred columns in it - and start exploring it without having to do any customization first.
• reaperducer 6y ago
  Sorry but horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps Sounds like you've never had to build anything where people want to compare a set of three or more choices.
  • j-pb 6y ago
    It's exactly because I had to build such things. You can have pretty much as many things as you want in one dimension, but the other dimension has to be limited in turn, or people will get lost and confused. If your users start to hold a piece of paper up to their screen to not loose their row you've failed as an UX designer. Give them the ability to make sub-selections, and to reorder data. And compress the rest into interdependent interactive charts where selecting a data point in one, highlights the corresponding values in the others.
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      That's awesome that your suppositions work for your use case. But they are not universal truths. Try comparing five Medicaid plans, in a method that is easy for people with an eighth-grade reading level to understand, that will also pass the scrutiny of three different government agencies. Sub-selections, reordering data, and all the other things you list won't matter a whit.
      • j-pb 6y ago
        Neither will an unlabeled grid with data values that you scrolled into and are lost in. That MIGHT actually pass government scrutiny, but if anything that's a good metric for how bad government approval is of a metric. Also we're not talking about 5 columns here, but about 50. Good luck comparing 50 medicaid plans by continuously scrolling back and forth between them. How does that not immediately evoke a cartoon-ish ridiculous scene in your mind?!