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>If you hide the scrollbar until you scroll, then users often won't scroll, because they won't know there is more to see. Do you have evidence for this, even i
by Kranar 6y ago
>If you hide the scrollbar until you scroll, then users often won't scroll, because they won't know there is more to see.
Do you have evidence for this, even if it's anecdotal? To be honest a statement like that sounds like a hypothesis and a reasonable hypothesis, but I am not joking when I say when we did user testing, it was absolutely never the case that someone actually didn't scroll because they didn't see a scroll bar. Now we didn't test specifically for that but I'd be surprised if a controlled experiment testing that hypothesis concluded that people will actually just never bother to scroll unless they explicitly see a scrollbar.
Scrolling is actually a very natural thing that people do without the need to visibly see a scrollbar. Using a dedicated scroll button or gesture is a very cheap and consequence free action to perform. I'd be very surprised if you have data that contradicts this and indicates that an actual human being would simply not scroll because the only visual cue/indicator that people use is a scrollbar, rather than the multitude of context specific information available to indicate whether more content is available.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI only have anecdotes to support this, but unless I'm a really weird outlier, I'd say it's indicative: - Almost every discussion on Apple and scrollbars I see on-line has someone telling a story of how they didn't realize some app was scrollable, because its visual grid happened to align perfectly with viewport size of their iPhone/iPad; - I got caught myself by this a few times on PC, where the design of the page looked complete, scollbars were hidden, and I didn't realize I could scroll down; - I've been the person to tell some confused non-technical people that they could scroll down to see more, because the layout of a webpage did not make this obvious, and without a scrollbar visible, they were just puzzled why there's so little information on the screen. Plural of anecdote is not data, so I'm open to the possibility I may have just had peculiar luck, but I think it's fair to assign a low prior to that. > that an actual human being would simply not scroll because the only visual cue/indicator that people use is a scrollbar, rather than the multitude of context specific information available to indicate whether more content is available What these cases had in common was that there was insufficient context-specific information available to make it apparent the content is scrollable (and - anecdotally, again - in my experience, non-tech-savvy people don't have the nervous tick of just randomly scrolling on the wheel, to check if it does something). Sometimes, the only such contextual information was the feeling you got after reading everything on the page, that something is missing. But if your users have to reach that point to figure out they can try scrolling, the UI failed at its job, and wasted them a minute of their lives.
- jacobsenscott 6y agoThe worst offender I've seen is the share button on the iphone. You can scroll down to select more sharing options, but the first row of options aligns perfectly with the bottom of the screen. I've seen at least two people have no idea there are more options.