There are options at the system level, I find it great that most browsers follow them and sites cannot willy-nilly change them without my consent.
Too bad Google once again leads the way of being a prominent example of a bad idea with its custom scroll bars on many of its properties.
That's the crux of the problem: the only time a website makes changes to the scrollbar is when the author thinks it makes sense.
I just disagree all of the time.
For every other regular site, and even most web apps, I always prefer native, for Windows.
Applications should respect the DE settings for UI. Browsers are the main culprits here, but only because CAD software isn't widely used. Oh, and there's MS Office, that will respect absolutely nothing. All of those are in the wrong. But everywhere the DE is powerless to enforce its style onto applications, so this is a much harder problem to fix;
Then they went to Lion and ruined them: grey and almost invisible by design. Magical mystery popping into existence when you hover where it ought to be. Probably. I think this is when they inverted the magic mouse scroll behaviour to pretend like your iMac was an iPhone.
The backwards scrolling is way more obnoxious though, and I rage every time I use someone else's Mac or do a fresh install.
Most of the times I encounter backward scrolling on someone else's Mac, it's only there because they never realised Settings let you invert it to sane and useful!
People switching back and forth between Macs and iPhones or iPads initially found it very inconvenient/frustrating to have window scrolling on a touchpad and content scrolling on a touchscreen.
It was decided that switching the Mac to be consistent with iOS would cause momentary frustration for Mac users (it requires a few days of retraining to get used to) but would be less frustrating for most users than preserving two inconsistent behaviors into perpetuity.
The option to keep the Mac on window scrolling was included to mollify those few Mac users unwilling to spend a few days or weeks re-training themselves to a reversed gesture.
If you do have a problem, then you can switch it in System Preferences. Everyone wins.
These are UI/UX conventions. Everything is "pretend".
For example, users whose mental model of scrolling tracks the viewport will want to scroll up to move the content down. The viewport goes in the opposite direction of the content.
Fair enough.
However such users don't seem to want the same for horizontal scrolling. Tracking the viewport left moves the content to the right and vice versa. But horizontal scrolling in macOS always tracks the content regardless of the setting in System Preferences > Trakcpad > Scroll direction: Natural.
The exception (turning it off for "inverted" scrolling or "viewport tracking") is only for vertical scrolling, not horizontal, which suggests the mental model can be adapted though users who prefer viewport tracking report they cannot adjust.
Of the few people I've bumped into who had it set to natural, and had for some considerable time, well even those were happy to learn it could be changed, and didn't want to go back. So there's probably something makes it feel odd, and stay feeling odd, for many. What I couldn't say, but not just restricted to those who spent time on other platforms too, like me. Of people whose machines I get to use from time to time at work, they're all set to unnatural too. We're nearly all iPhone users. So it's not just me being odd and rare edge case. :)
Personally, I don't want the same mental model between phone and desktop, as the metaphors are different. UI should look different, act different, suited to using each device. The Win 8 on, Lion on desire to make my laptop "feel" more like a mobile, continues to feel like a huge mistake.
I don't think this is correct.
The setting affects both vertical and horizontal scrolling.
If the page is long enough for infinite scrolling, I'm probably going to have a slightly error-prone recollection of the exact string of text I'm looking for. Taking search away from me makes this worse.
There's a bit of psychology that says when someone is experiencing a strong emotion, good or bad, they will associate it with a person nearby, whether they deserve it or not. This has applications from espionage to team building to crisis management.
One of the wrinkles of this is that if someone is already or almost experiencing a strong emotion and you add to it in any way, you've made yourself a target.
One of the things I tell mentees about code and test quality (especially the latter) is that in the grand scheme of things, nobody (read: a tiny fraction) is going to look at your code for fun. They're going to look at it because something bad happened, near it or in it.
Assume the person reading your code is already having a bad day. Don't make it worse. Especially if it ends up having nothing to do with you.
The infinite scroll bozos, at least in the scope of productivity tools, are making my not-great day worse. The ones that 'fix' this by hijacking CTRL-F and do their own half-assed implementation of search are just doubling down. If you're going to listen on CTRL-F, maybe force-update the entire list instead?
Yeah, stop messing with my scrollbar.
I understand the motivation for controlling the experience, but I really think designers are undervaluing consistency. It feels like the car I drive every day acts different on one road. Sure, there's a very tiny chance it's an improvement if a lot of time and thought has been invested, but in all likelihood it's just very jarring.
It sorts of look like the Windows 10 scrollbars, but is 1/5th or one quarter the size of a regular scrollbar, and is hidden among the background of the page. Not what I prefer, and what I set up in my OS settings.
On a mac, to actually grab the scroller for scrubbing, you need to scroll a bit to make it visible and then manage to bring your cursor into a tiny area using the trackpad within a few seconds before the scroller disappears. If you miss, clicking activates window resizing.
UIs need to be functional first. Being pretty should never trump being functional.
I mean, if I write an app and hide a "dysfunctional prettiness [Y/n]" configuration somewhere in settings, is that a good thing?
I'd argue there are at least two better options that are trivial to implement, and surely more if one cares to do UX due diligence when trying some novel design.
Wasn't your original complaint that someone decided what was "better"? Or are you complaining that they didn't take your choice? Point being that someone that decided otherwise thought they had a good reason for their decision, too. In this case, it could be argued that trackpads reduce the need for the scrollbars. (I have no idea what the real argument for such UI behavior is.)
In my experience, the backdrop in many of those cases is that UX changes get rolled out because people need to justify their jobs or they think X is prettier/popular. You don't hear nearly as much about people doing UX research as you do of people cranking out React things, and it would be extremely benevolent to assume developers do in fact do expensive, time consuming UX sessions w/ users.
If we talk specifically about scrollbars, maybe a good litmus test is this:
- if the default was no scrollbar whatsoever, would that be a problem for you?
- if the default was a read-only scrollbar (e.g. it merely reports whereabouts in the page you are, but does not respond to mouse events), would that be a problem for you?
If the answer to either of those is "no", you probably aren't actually using it. They could conceivably be configurations too, but why?
Consider this hypothetical parallel: why not hide the "Help" menu item in apps? Personally, I don't use it and it would clean up the UI, so it must be fine, right? Well, not necessarily. Because if you bother to do UX sessions w/ users, you may find that people looking to use that specific feature will have expectations about where it should be.
In 1990, everyone scrolled up or down by clicking little buttons at the ends (or at one end) of the scrollbar, or by dragging the scrollbar up and down. By 2019, these buttons are unnecessary and have been removed, and the main purpose of the scrollbar is to passively report the position in the page. Dragging it up and down still works, but few people bother.
But honestly even then it’s not common for me to run into those. I’m a keyboard user, so the thing I get persnickety over is whether or not you got your focus order right, if you steal keyboard focus senselessly, or if you made a UI that only responds to mouse clicks.
Scrollbars are a tool and they should be functional: visible, properly sized and interactive. It helps if a scrollbar looks and functions the same on all our content, because it takes less mental strain to use.
It may be that you don't like scrollbars for your content. The obvious solution is to make your content fit so it does not require scrollbars. If you cannot manage that you will have to live with the fact that scrollbars are there as a functional tool and make sure it is kept functional. In analogy: If I sell furniture you have to self assemble I can choose to design it to not require tools. If it does require tools I should make sure people can actually use those tools to assemble and not try to hide that tools should be used by pretending the thing to put nails in is not a hammer.
With Mac they can generally influence the scrolling interface by making one of the best trackpads and magic mice standard, where scrolling is a critical part and not an afterthought, plus lots of visuals showing how to scroll with it.
You really don’t need to click and drag the scrollbar very often if at all. Especially for page scrolling which the article explained - it’s more important for overflowed objects, especially horizontal ones. And if you need to scroll there’s no guarantee that having 25px control design vs 50px (guessing) like windows would help, the click area tends to be a wide as the bar part not the control.
This complaint looks disingenuous to me. If you're using a trackpad, you already have scrolling built in and the scrollbar is there primarily for visual feedback.
The reason that scrollbars can now be invisible by default is exactly _because_ of the ubiquity of touchpads and mice with built-in scrolling.
It now widens when you move the cursor near it, so they have mitigated the issue.
For short scrolling, that's fine. For long documents, you're sitting there flailing.
When a user realizes that a scrollbar may be a useful feature, but it's somehow hard to obtain, it's too late to complain, and the Stockholm syndrome kicks in.
This is not your concern, you should spend more time looking at the ads. /s
You're already buying into the whole app and there's good reason to not like the design decisions they made. I also think many companies overvalue the need for it.
Photoshop for most of its history used the OS' UI paradigms. Only in the past decade or so has it adopted its own. I'm pretty sure it used the OS' scroll bars at least until CS5 around 2010.
This "very, very narrow" number of applications you are suggesting is exactly what I was talking about. Those are the ones who need custom scrollbar solutions, and the way to get that done now is obtuse, brittle and hard to maintain.
In all likelihood, I probably would. I chose my OS and one reason was those conventions. Especially on the web, developers seem to make very poor decisions on when to override things like scrolling. It's reasonable if, like you said, the UI is very complex and if I'm going to spend hours using it. In practice, they mess up conventions on a single scrolling page I'm spending 2 minutes on and it's usually a clue to avoid that site in the future.
> Those are the ones who need custom scrollbar solutions, and the way to get that done now is obtuse, brittle and hard to maintain.
That /has/ to be expected if you're stomping on the conventions. If you're changing the scrollbar, you're likely significantly changing the whole UI.
Scrolljacking and replacing the scrollbar are two very different things. And the problem is that there isn't a streamlined, consistent way to replace the scrollbar, so it's always a hacky mess.