Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to make scroll bars invisible

That kind of thinking is why we can't have nice things.

I want apps that do things for me, not apps are crippled to satisfy some fashionable UX fad-dogma.

This is the actual start of the thread: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1369705219110498304

It would of course be much better to have the previous tweet partially on-screen, possibly under a small gradient.

It really shows how batshit insane UI/UX zeitgeist has become, when the only way to have usable user interface is to use accessibility features.

Manila folders are still sold at office supply stores, so I'm pretty sure that they're still in widespread use.

A version from a year+ or so ago used nice, colorful icons [1] in the sidebar to access the main functions. The late(st)? They made the icons grayscale... on a gray-ish background [2]. It is really giving me a bad user experience, since I have to stop and read the text every time, instead using the RGB-shorthand (aka color) that is way faster to my brain.

This could have been fixed with a simple option in the configuration dialog, but TMK it is not.

I guess the flat icons are soon to follow, too.

[0] https://lunarship.com/

[1] https://lunarship.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Phototheca_...

[2] https://giveawayoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/b0a1...

I also agree on the google icons. After years I still get google photos and google drive confused, not to mention youtube and strava (both red/orange-ish icons). I think you're fine, it's design trends that are getting ridiculous

A computer is a tool that a user employs to accomplish one or more tasks. Computers are not a design statement. Computers are tools.

Yes, many users between the late 90s, and early 2000s, were a mass of people which had never, ever used computers. They bought them for the Internet, and as their workplace adopted them, to work at home.

Many of these users grew up without televisions, calculators, you name it. Yet all new users today are essentially using a tablet or phone at age 5.

Users are not as easily confused as they were in the 90s. I mean really, Amazon's website has more complexity than most desktop apps.

Isn't vaporwave a self-consciously nostalgic aesthetic though? It's glorified because it captures a kind of ideal of human-computer interaction that wasn't recognized as such at the time.

Personally I don't mind material design (which is not really the same as flat design). I'd just like to see a little less padding and fewer hidden UI elements.

Skeuomorphs, by their technical definition, are a core part of art and design that goes far deeper than just "photorealistic icons and extraneous textured backgrounds." The modern iOS calendar and phone dialer are natural skeuomorphs, since they're carrying forward a familiar mode of interaction. There isn't any real reason why a calendar has to be a grid of dates, but it certainly is a lot easier to think about it that way due to generations of familiarity.

Including current UX people. They are young enough, digital-native enough to take things for granted ...

... whereas people originally building the interfaces from the "golden age" mentioned upthread could not assume anything, having to build, research, and test everything from scratch.-

At some point, they decided to toss all that out the window for aesthetics and shininess.

I feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides, because they'd need to make sure it still looks and works fine when the user is running a theme that makes everything look like a particularly ugly Enlightenment theme.

My conclusion is that these inefficient designs aimed purely at someone who is seeing the app for the first time are a result of two things:

1. Designers / UX "experts" generally have no clue what they're doing. I don't know why, but every single designer I've met has only designed trivial software. I've never met anyone who's designed complex systems, like MS Word, 3DS Max, etc, stuff that people use for hours every day to perform complex work. At the same time, half the developers I know have worked on very complex software at some point in their careers, so it's not like complex software does not get built at all. Does anyone know a single UI designer who has designed an app of that level of complexity? It's really strange that they literally don't seem to exist. So they've never worked on an app that users use extensively, daily, for years, to perform complex tasks, and their whole mindset is about "how will someone seeing it for the first time use it". So when you do bring UI experts on such an app, they have no clue what they're doing, and users complain about their design decisions. And people who get hired to design things are people who've designed e-commerce web sites and mobile apps in the past, because those seem to be the only people that exist.

2. If it's an app that will be demoed in person or demos will be provided as a part of marketing, anyone involved with sales in any way will push hard for this because it demos well. They're not demoing to the guy who's been using the app for 4 hours a day for 5 years, they're demoing to the guy who is going to be using the app, or not even to that guy, but to his boss who isn't even going to be using it. I regularly get requests like "can we make this automatic so the user can do it with 1 click" when it's an action the user will very rarely perform so it doesn't matter whether it takes 4 or 2 seconds, and it provides more flexibility to the user to do it in 2 clicks instead of the app making an assumption that joins 2 actions into one. The reason? They will do it in the demo and they can say "look you can do this with 1 click" even though from the perspective of actually using the application it's not helpful.

I am almost ashamed that I worked on an app where you upload stuff by having an "Upload" button on the main page, that you press, and then it guides you through the process of selecting where to upload and what to upload, and then it uploads. Think about how inefficient and cumbersome this is. I guess the point is that if you've never seen the app before, and want to upload, you see "UPLOAD" staring at you, so you press it and it guides you through the rest, there is basically no way to get confused. In fact every action in this app works through a "wizard" of some kind, there is no concept of freely navigating and contextually performing actions on objects as you navigate. If you want to perform an action, you start by pressing a button with the name of that action, then get guided through the rest over multiple pages. It's the literal opposite of how I would build an app if I was building it for myself.

Spend almost a decade building enterprise software and heard EXACTLY that a stressful number of times. On one hand, I think that maybe my customers (mostly Fortune 500) couldn't hire anyone with at least 90 IQ, because, shit, it had to be simple! And also, probably, those companies provided the worse customer service ever, since they wanted to have people operating their software with zero training.

Now, besides making the interface dumb, less productive, we had the problem that people were much more concerned with making things easier to use (and pretty) and not productive.

(and don't you think that they'd ever talk to the actual user...)

Thats not a tereible thing to do, but the UI UX group has too many loud characters that are hell bent on applying this minimalist beauty to everything.

Casepoint is the recent update to Youtube android app. Earlier, when i would search something, on the top right corner was a small button that allowed me to filter the results. Now its hidden behind a menu. Why? God knows. The worst part is, its not like the menu has 10 items and the filter icon was moved into it. The menu has just one item and its the filter.

I hated Apples shift to minimalist design.

I hate apps that think minimal design is functional.

There is a place for minimal design, and its not everywhere.

For users like myself it was a step back as I skim read incredibly fast and have a hard time with remembering icons. I could vertically scan a drop down menu for what text I want 5X faster than finding the same option on a ribbon menu with half the items.

I was the same person who absolutely hated the vista and up start menu. I had about 4 columns on my xp start menu and could find anything I wanted very fast just skim reading it. Vista+ was horrible until I got an ssd as the search was always several seconds long.

Now I like the search on a ssd these days but until they worked the kinks out and I got an ssd it was way slower than a popout style menu.

I think it was a good change. Anecdotally, I noticed a big drop in people not being able to find particular functions since it's introduction (if you exclude the spate of complaints about the shift to the ribbon itself, which fizzled out over time as people got used to it).

On a 9:16 or 10:16 portrait display, it would be perfect, but an element like that should probably be on the side for a newer laptop. A very quick google image search suggests that isn't a configuration option.

The scrollbar appears if you use a scroll gesture.

It’s obvious with web pages, and with most content when you can scroll, and removal of visual noise and increasing the content area is good.

I personally use a mouse, and so I have them turned on, but generally I like Apple removing unnecessary clutter.

It’s really no big deal at all.

There's no reason dark mode should make things invisible.

I just wish there was also a "prefer full-contrast body text" mode too. I want white-on-black and black-on-white, not gray-on-gray. Most OSes have some high-contrast accessibility modes, but they're not ideal because they tend to affect all text.

I dislike modes of any sort, but day and night are modes in the real world, and the device might as well accommodate that.

I would definitely be grateful to never again hear "When is X going to introduce dark mode?" for every single app and web site. Outside of that very specific instance where I'm required to have an app in my face while maintaining night vision, I'm perfectly happy to use "day mode" with the brightness adjusted.

When we entered the “an artist designed everything in Flash” era and its successor flat design we saw a big hit to discoverability (I still routinely witness people being amazed at core app functions existing because they hadn’t realized that plain black text was a button, etc.) and some specific usability hits which disproportionately affect certain users: click targets requiring very high precision, lack of or inconsistent keyboard navigation and shortcuts, contrast/color/size choices which are hard for many people to read.

iOS is interesting for the degree to which you can re-enable functionality but non default options definitely get less testing.

What designers fail to understand is the difference between complexity resulting from disorganization vs. complexity resulting from logically laid out tools on the wall - all available for selection in a moment's notice. The latter is the complexity all humans can handle. We do this everyday when shopping groceries, driving cars to navigating airports.

There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.

For the browser I use the Vimium plugin to navigate and only need to use the mouse in the case the site is badly made and e.g. a button is not a button but some styled div element with an event listener attached.

Most of the other daily needs like functions of the tiling window manager (AwesomeWM), Editors (IDEA, VS Code, emacs), terminals, etc. come out of the box with good keyboard control support.

What industry are you in where you can ignore 10% of the user base?

I wonder whether this was tested with the average modern website or a well-designed UI. Or on a desktop, which usually does not come with a touchpad.

The main reason I rarely drag the scrollbar is that it's become a total pain: they're generally hard to hit with the mouse because they tend to get narrower every year(Fitts' law anyone?), they auto-hide or even when not hidden have such a low contrast that I have a hard time making out the edges, or they're simply in a half-broken state thanks to convoluted web design. All those things basically go against the whole purpose of scrollbars.

Please don't mess with the scrollbar and scrolling in general. It provides no benefit and breaks UX in ways nobody can predict. With so many operating systems, user interfaces and browser plugins it's often trivial to make many websites near unusable because they were built by people who think they know better than some boring standard.

How did you determine this difference? I use a mouse with my laptop, because work only gives us laptops.

No it doesn't - and why would it? Any reasonable modern mouse has a scroll-wheel or touch area so you don't need to click the scrollbar.

Not only does it not show the scroll bar by default, but (not sure if this is a Chrome or Mac issue), when it does show up during a scroll operation, you have to have great reflexes to grab it with a click if you want to.

By the way, vSphere is part of the problem. It's one of those web applications that try very hard to look like a desktop application. It doesn't use the standard HTML behavior of building a page that scrolls. It clips everything at the borders of the screen. Ironically that reduced functionality probably cost them a lot of developer time.

The scrollbar is the only way to scrub/seek through a large page's content efficiently.

Also, mice with physical scroll wheels can only scroll in one direction.

With OPs version you get immediately lost in the grid because the headers don't float along with the scrolled view, which makes this best case useless, worst case harmful (e.g. confusing important columns).

If you have thousands of columns you're not going to do manual eyeballing of values anyways, you'll lose track because scrolling is not accurate enough, so you might as well represent rows as documents which densely shows the fields/columns and values, and which can then in turn be shown in a vertically scrollable list.

You can have pretty much as many things as you want in one dimension, but the other dimension has to be limited in turn, or people will get lost and confused.

If your users start to hold a piece of paper up to their screen to not loose their row you've failed as an UX designer.

Give them the ability to make sub-selections, and to reorder data. And compress the rest into interdependent interactive charts where selecting a data point in one, highlights the corresponding values in the others.

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.

Though again, from user testing sessions I've observed, I'd say that "not knowing whether or not content is scrollable" can be a universal problem, not limited just to Mac users.

With scrollbars, auto hiding /re-appearing isn’t even something I notice happening.