Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I run into so many websites that I think are completely broken because they have a scollable popover or some other weird element, but it's impossible to tell that there is content because the scroll bar is hidden on this small interior frame.

Absolutely infuriating. I blame iOS and macOS for encouraging this insanity and starting the fashion trend, and tangentially whoever pushed along this whole "flat" UI trend that makes it so hard to guess at what is what.

UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.

View on HN

In the context of the original iPhone at least, hiding the scrollbar when not scrolling makes some amount of sense… when your screen is 3.5" in size and your goal is to render content with "desktop" fidelity, there's not a whole lot of room for a scrollbar, plus most people aren't going to be interacting with the scrollbar.

For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's not much of a good reason to hide them.

> there's not much of a good reason to hide them.

It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.

I don't mind having them hidden as an option, but there should be an OS user level override that all apps and sites *obey*. macOS has the first half covered, but electron apps and some browsers have yet to cover the latter half.

As the article says, not everyone can use a scroll wheel, and not everyone even has a scroll wheel or touchpad. I personally find using mouse scroll wheels quite painful due to RSI caused from decades of mouse abuse. Yet, designers find scroll bars and up-and-down scroll arrows icky so fuck me, I guess. :(

> so fuck me, I guess

Obviously not, but you also shouldn't expect the whole world to be designed around your needs. If you have difficulty using the expected input method, you should use alternatives with the same functionality, not expect others to redesign their apps in your preferred way.

That's the wrong mentality tbh

Design for the best accessibility first and foremost, then try and make things look "prettier".

Disabilities can affect anyone at any time and shouldn't be an afterthought.

Often, you don't even need to lift a finger, design-wise or implementation-wise, to have good accessibility. The system-wide or toolkit defaults are usually quite accessible right out of the box. macOS's horrible disappearing scrollbars being a huge exception.

Most of the terrible designs and accessibility problems stem from software going out its way to write custom controls or force controls to look and behave in a non-default way. It's not an afterthought--people are deliberately adding code to make their software worse.

"Accessibility" here refers to one person's very particular disability. You can't possibly predict the entire gamut of disabilities people might face. Trying to do so "first and foremost" is utter madness.

Nobody's asking you to predict anything, they're asking you to leave the functional design elements of a scrollbar alone and not fuck them up. Probably if you rent an angle grinder and remove the handrails from the steps at your local library it'll look nicer, but you don't do that, because there's a good reason for those steps to have handrails.

Accessibility here refers to RSI and fine motor control problems. Common disabilities. And studied for computer use already.

Designing with accessibility in mind makes software better for everyone, period.

You design a clear, visible, distinctive scroll bar and buttons? Boom, you've catered to everyone with bad vision (for any reason: from blindness to eye surgery), reduced motor skills (for any reason: from arthritis to old age to hand injuries), non-technical users (so they don't have to hunt around the interface hoping to discover hidden features).

And this goes for everything in software.

Disability is a spectrum, and you yourself will be disabled in one way or another, multiple times, during the course of your life. Be it from old age, surgeries, injuries, strain from sport or mundane tasks like holding a baby.

There are a number of common disabilities. Everyone starts losing near vision just after 40, which works out to almost half of the people using a computer expected lifespan is around 78, and babies don't use computers). 10% of the population is color blind of some sort. Most people will have a broken arm sometime in their life (the only statistic I can find is 6 million people in the US break their arm every year: this could also be a few clumsy people breaking their arm several times per year and most don't ever. I think most people breaking their arm at some point seems more likely)

> Disabilities can affect anyone at any time and shouldn't be an afterthought.

Yes

It is thr toolkit builder's job.

As an application developer you should not have to

> you also shouldn't expect the whole world to be designed around your needs.

I don't think anyone is expecting that. What's reasonable to expect is that these things are configurable so people can have a UI that works for them.

Scroll bars were fine.

I guess we don't need ramps because everyone has feet.

I keep 10,000 lines of scrollback in iTerm. Flicking the scroll wheel isn't gonna cut it. I NEED the scrollbar.

I was searching for a way to make Mac scrollbars wider literally yesterday. It's 100% a real problem.

It does not look nicer. It looks more mysterious. Where in the list am I? Is there anything below to scroll to? Above? To the right, everyone's favorite?

And no, trying to scroll every control just to find this out is not my ideal of usability and comfort.

In an age of information overload, perhaps the mystery is exactly what we need.

We know the exact temperature and humidity outside, we have logs of the exact times that our smart lights turned on and off. Our watches tell us our heart rate throughout the day and even its variability. Our phones monitor how much we use them, and in which apps, and report back weekly. When I had outlook in the office, it would summarize how much time I spent in meetings, seemingly to increase my stress level one more notch.

The lack of a scroll bar returns mystery, but even more, it brings us back to a simpler time when we weren't overloaded by information such as "how much is left of this text?" or "is there a button hidden somewhere on this page that allows me to complete my task, or is the app just broken?"

These are the sorts of small joys that we miss in the Information Age.

It's so you can doomscroll for hours without realizing how much content you have consumed. It's pointless to know how much is left because the feed is infinite. You can't ever get to the bottom that a scroll bar would imply as new content is loaded.

It is an enabler of information overload, not a solution or respite.

I was being sarcastic, as I absolutely despise the lack of scroll bars. But perhaps I was being too subtle

I recall a particular phone app controlling thermostat settings with a beautifully styled row of buttons:

   Ⓢ Ⓜ Ⓣ Ⓦ Ⓣ Ⓕ

Wednesday Thursday Friday, indeed.

> Where in the list am I?

that information can be conveyed with a 1-pixel wide bar with proper color contrast, not requiring a waste of the whole scrollbar's width

Maybe this bright idea that information and control are separate things can inspire the future gen of UI designers to actually make this a reality

(For humour purposes only: Fuck me, I've been holding it wrong the whole time!)

On my desktops I've got more screen width than any of my open windows know what to do with, and they still want to skimp on scroll bar width. I can understand with mobile, but mobile design decisions are crowding out desktop usability. It's lazy and cheap but the market is monopolised enough that the approaching horizon can only look "no worse" at best.

> It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". My work laptop does not have a "scroll wheel". There is a posibility to scroll using the touch pad but it is undocumented and hit or miss.

> UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.

At risk of hijacking this complaint thread onto an even more inflammatory set of rails:

They may just be copying modern cinema. I can't watch many movies or TV shows these days without subtitles - even when the kids are quiet / sleeping / at school.

I don’t even understand how this flat ui thing got popular

Reply on news.ycombinator.com