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Comment by nathcd | Hacker News Reader

I like it! I just wish it weren't fixed. The design does indeed add clarity and make it easier to quickly parse compared to the old nav. But it being fixed makes it feel like a design that's trying to coerce me into staying on the site longer. Which is fine (and more and more sites are doing this anyway), but to me it makes Stack Overflow feel a little bit less like a tool, and a little bit more like a company trying to subtly influence my behavior for their profit. But I'm probably reading way too much into this.

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> I just wish it weren't fixed.

I thought the article mentioned this, but there's a user preference to turn that off ("Disable stickyness").

http://stackoverflow.com/users/preferences/

Reduce usable screen space by 15 percent all the item = instant disable. If they didn't give that option, would have blocked the whole bar, not that it currently has much use anyways.

Users aren't clicking on it? Better shove it in their face so it's noticed.

I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.

IMO, fixed navbars are almost as bad as popups.

> I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.

Oh man, I've gotta strongly disagree with this. To me, those are just distracting and in practice often end up being fidgety. For tall webpages I think an easy and simple alternative is having a link like <a href="#">top</a> at the bottom of the document or wherever it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems like many designers don't really go for easy and simple.

Eh, those links tend to be difficult to find and not very useful in my experience. Usually it's not much harder to just scroll back to the top manually.

Plus the "show on scroll up" bars have the advantage of making it easy to access the top navigation without losing your place on the page, which is useful if you just want to open a link from the top bar in a new tab or quickly check your notifications or something.

I find the ones that reappear when you scroll up are quite annoying, particularly on mobile which is, sadly, where you actually need them more!

In this case, I am utterly indifferent to Stack Overflow's being fixed. At least it's not going to surprise me.

It's toggleable. The default right now is opt-out. But I think it can be made opt-in for logged in users and opt-out for anons (to make them remember and notice where they came, most don't even notice the url when searching the internet).

> I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.

Absolutely not. Bloomberg does this; it just means the "scroll up" feature is broken. You try to scroll up, and you get the navbar instead of the text you were trying to scroll to. If you're trying to add a feature that infuriates visitors several times over for every page of yours they view, then sure. If you don't want that, don't have stealth navbars.

> I like it! I just wish it weren't fixed.

Now there's just a bar I'm ignoring that's obscuring part of the useful information.

UX and business decisions seem to never get along

Yep. They even bring it up themselves in the very beginning:

>“When I come here I’m on a mission; I don’t care about the rest.”

>“You’re only there for 1 reason: to find the answer to your question.”

>“From my point of view, nothing above the question title exists.”

>“I scroll down and read the question.”

People google a question, click on a Stack Overflow link, get their answer, close the tab. It works perfectly. Just not for SO, who want you to stay on the site after learning the answer.

The whole blog post is Stack Overflow trying to justify them making the UX worse on purpose.

As a long time (beta) user and contributor to SO, I completely agree.

I agree, but they did make it easy to make the bar disappear like before (in Preferences-Disable Stickyness).

You can't hold it against them that they want people to actually use their site.

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