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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

Typically there are two affordances that tell the user he can scroll:

1) A scroll bar

2) Clipped content

Many browsers hide the scroll bar, so the only thing left is 2).

For some reason designers think that it's a good idea to scale the content in such a way that the initial page load looks like a complete page.

This is so idiotic! You are actively misleading the customer! You are hiding all the marketing copy.

Some designers have realised this is a problem, and they add a little arrow to indicate you can scroll. Nobody understands those weird arrows except other designers.

The easiest way to tell users that there is more content is to show it! Make it so that part of the second headline is visible, and noone will miss the fact that there is more content below!

If you go for sexy screenshots, sure, go make your first section fill the browser window. If you want your visitors to read your page, don't do that!

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Interesting. I’m pretty sensitive to UX but this has never been a problem for me. I don’t come across single non scrolling static websites that often, and knowing that the entire content will most likely never be at the top, I immediately scroll down without thinking.

I find it extremely fascinating that some people actually have to look for a scroll bar or clipped content (spoon fed) in order to scroll down. Sometimes I don’t even know there is one unless I have to speed drag on a long page.

> I don’t come across single non scrolling static websites that often

google.com comes to mind.

Actually, now that this post curiously made me look: https://duckduckgo.com/ ACTUALLY has content below the initial search form. I have been visiting that page for a very long time now and I actually never knew that until testing it right now to add to above list. Wow.

aside: not sure why you included the word "static" in there, since it's kind of irrelevant to what users see. Maybe you meant it in a different way than most people take it, which usually means the site looks the same to all users.

age, every one has different life experience

The "spoon fed" bit is insulting. People are not infants if they don't guess that there's an invisible thing.

If designers want people to know something exists, they should generally make it visible. Especially given that with pages like this one, deemphasizing or hiding things is a common dark pattern to force people to think there are no alternatives.

> I’m pretty sensitive to UX but this has never been a problem for me.

> I find it extremely fascinating that some people actually have to look for a scroll bar or clipped content (spoon fed) in order to scroll down.

This demonstrates serious lack of sensitivity as you're unable to look beyond your own immediate usage.

As a web dev and designer myself I can't agree with you any more. People outside of design and development often seem obsessed with the "first fold" containing everything needed but it's not always the best approach, this is a perfect case.

Before I read the comment you replied to I myself too thought that I'd need to open the Inspect Element Editor to kill the modal hiding the example page / example image of the "Kaban Email", even if it were just an image I wanted to see what it looked like and if it seemed like something I'd enjoy / benefit from using.

#2 can be tricky. Since everyone's screens can be of different sizes and resolutions, its hard to have a "perfect" layout that always clips the next bit of content on every single screen.

I would imagine its the opposite; you have to try pretty hard to make your content fit perfectly. Putting no effort should naturally lead to a misfit, and thus clipping, unless you have a lot of empty space.

One potential solution to that is to have a 'fade out' gradient effect at the bottom of the screen, which signals to the user that they need to scroll down to see the rest of the page.

It's not very hard these days. You can use height: 90vh (the page is using 100vh) and set min-height as appropriate. vh unit is a percentage relative to the viewport height and is already universally supported[1].

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=vh

This is awesome, thanks! I would have killed for this years ago.

> Many browsers hide the scroll bar

On touch devices, yes. On desktop, not really. I think Safari on OS X is the only one, all others (basically everything on Windows and Linux) always show scroll bars on scrollable content. And on touch devices, users tend to try scroll quite readily, so I don't think clipped content is a necessity.

However, artificially stretching content to the fold is still against the idea of a (scrollable) website.

Chrome on macOS hides scroll bars, too.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"

___

This setting in terminal will always show scroll bars.

Also this:

System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always

On the Mac, virtually all applications, including the major web browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox), do this. You can change it with a setting, but the system default is to auto-hide all scrollbars.

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