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I'm in Firefox on Windows and would not have noticed that the table is scrollable either. The horizontal scrollbar is way down below row 100 (about 6 pages of

I'm in Firefox on Windows and would not have noticed that the table is scrollable either. The horizontal scrollbar is way down below row 100 (about 6 pages of vertical scrolling to get there), and since column sorting is set at the top you don't go down to the bottom of the table unless you're looking at it thinking "I wonder what dam has the 100th largest capacity?" Maybe different for someone taking a serious look through the data, but for anyone getting a glanced impression off of it they're going to sort by X and look at the top 10-20 rows.

simonw 6y ago
Yeah that's the exact problem I'm trying to solve.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  Found this for a non-jquery top scrollbar: https://jsfiddle.net/nsG5w/3/ https://jsfiddle.net/nsG5w/3/ No license, but looks simple enough to implement. As for the Mac people with no visible scrollbars, I don't know if there's a fix. Maybe you just rely on 95% of them being on trackpads where they're much more likely to notice a horizontal scrolling table than people with scroll wheels. I wish we had some standard but more compact UI affordance to indicate scrollable content without needing a scrollbar. Like an ellipsis for truncated text. But touchscreen phones have definitely driven user behavior to "just try scrolling everything, if it doesn't scroll that's how you know it's not scrollable." Not great for scroll wheels, and I'm sure there are plenty of phone users who have issues with this too. Not everybody is constantly touching everything to see if it works. But the only thing you'll see is sometimes there's a line of text that's only half visible. And with the amount of whitespace everywhere lately, that's not even likely to happen most of the time.
- crisnoble 6y ago
  If you constrain your table with respect to the viewport, with overflow scroll, your horizontal scrollbar will show at the bottom of the screen if enabled (similar to how google sheets does it). Either way having a shadow to indicate more content this way on the right side would indicate to touch users and scollbar hiders that this element can be scrolled. If you pin your header row in place your table will become a lot more scannable.

simonw 6y ago

Yeah that's the exact problem I'm trying to solve.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wlesieutre 6y ago
Found this for a non-jquery top scrollbar: https://jsfiddle.net/nsG5w/3/ https://jsfiddle.net/nsG5w/3/ No license, but looks simple enough to implement. As for the Mac people with no visible scrollbars, I don't know if there's a fix. Maybe you just rely on 95% of them being on trackpads where they're much more likely to notice a horizontal scrolling table than people with scroll wheels. I wish we had some standard but more compact UI affordance to indicate scrollable content without needing a scrollbar. Like an ellipsis for truncated text. But touchscreen phones have definitely driven user behavior to "just try scrolling everything, if it doesn't scroll that's how you know it's not scrollable." Not great for scroll wheels, and I'm sure there are plenty of phone users who have issues with this too. Not everybody is constantly touching everything to see if it works. But the only thing you'll see is sometimes there's a line of text that's only half visible. And with the amount of whitespace everywhere lately, that's not even likely to happen most of the time.
crisnoble 6y ago
If you constrain your table with respect to the viewport, with overflow scroll, your horizontal scrollbar will show at the bottom of the screen if enabled (similar to how google sheets does it). Either way having a shadow to indicate more content this way on the right side would indicate to touch users and scollbar hiders that this element can be scrolled. If you pin your header row in place your table will become a lot more scannable.