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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

To this day I am embarrassed to discover entire options in apps I had been using for ages, that were hidden behind invisible scroll regions. I even reported a bug once because I thought a feature was removed in an update, when in reality it was just a stupid default clipping issue with no visible scrolling.

When something looks like two simple controls in a small rectangle, and you have to accidentally shuffle your trackpad over it to figure out that it will move to reveal a dozen more controls, that is a failure of design.

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We were doing one of those online escape rooms the other day and I had this problem. We couldn't figure anything out and then finally realised the invisible scroll bars were hiding the fact there was A LOT more clue!

This very Twitter link invisibly starts half way down the page. Took me several seconds to realise you have to scroll up to get to the start.

Another bad one is Mac's "Do not disturb" option. Good luck finding that.

On desktop at least, there is a very subtle vertical line coming out of the top of the avatar image of the linked tweet. When you start to scroll up, you'll see that this line is part of the "thread" indicator that links all the posts above it. On my screen, it's about the same as the "x-height" (lower-case letter size) of the username font, at the thickness of the UI grid lines.

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

Technically that's not twitter's fault. The OP link points to the fourth tweet in the thread, so twitter loads the page with that tweet centered.

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

It's still Twitter's fault - there should be some indication that it isn't the start of the thread. Normally you'd do it with a scroll bar, but they are forbidden these days apparently.

We have an FAQ dedicated to this for our users. We get so many tickets from Mac users saying options are missing from our menu. Nope they are there, Apple just decided you shouldn't know they are there.

Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure.

> Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure.

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.

I agree. I have a UHD monitor and I get angry when I have to scroll to read the second sentence on a web page. That is not an uncommon thing anymore, and it sickens me.

I get angry when there's not a single letter on the first page of a web page, just a lead graphic.

The modern day splash screen. Pathetic.

Worse is that apparently Medium requires the stupid, and often irrelevant pictures. Apparently some numbskull decided there would be more "engagement" if an article included pictures. So pictures there shall be, regardless of whether they add to the content or not.

They are the photos of procrustes.

I feel exactly the same. I stare at full screen picture of some political correctness and then to have scroll all the way to find standard links where I can find anything related to real info.

What is even worse is that they've started dedicating yet another giant pic for each item/link.

It is a theft of one's time. Normally when I see such design I would leave the site immediately but unfortunately I must actually read some.

It’d be cool if real world was simple. Until that happens, apps that operate in it need to be very often complex.

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