If we are talking UI we need to talk about Apple.
The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them.
People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard.
I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.
Spot the indication that not all settings sections are shown in this screenshot, in all display settings and lighting conditions that your device might be used in.
* Were they ever there? I can't believe this dialog background - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/4/ - was the "winner" in any usability study. This was removed in 2003-11 with the release of 10.3.
b) Problems with specific dialog boxes or dynamically created features is evidence of problems with those dialog boxes or dynamically created features. As someone who's worked both as a developer and a designer, often the engineers win.
c) Assuming that these topics are simple enough for off-the-cuff reckonin' to validate or invalidate them are exactly why the engineers shouldn't win when it comes to interface decisions.
"Informs"?!? Deforms!
WTF does phone usage have to do with sabotaging the UI on a computer???
Of course I learned long ago and so I'm willing to accept that what was best practices back then might be wrong given new research that I'm not aware of. However this seems unlikely.
From what I've seen from colleagues in the consumer space they've predominantly switched to A/B testing and statistical clickstream/log analyses, though large companies sometimes still do run lab studies for important decisions and to rationalize the giant one-way mirror they installed.
Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin.
These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin?
Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday.
I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI. The lawyers themselves highlighted and handled the contrast of the document. Beyond the table itself, Excel’s menu bar is easy to read for the basic operating needs of a spreadsheet. I mean come on, the pivot table UI is clearly masterful. (If Excel was a native plaintext tabular format and you could pipe stdin/out to the GUI app? Gimme!)
However, a lot of software is basically useless these days. It’s not designed from the beginning to be productive in any shape or form.
Some stoned dance by a junkie under a highway overpass is definitely some kind of expressive art form. How much more productive is the expressive art forms promoted by TikTok, Twitter or Twitch?
There’s clearly a scale at play. I’m as big fan of Twitch as much as I’m a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. I’ve always appreciated the sociological aspects of sports. To add some context to my definition of productivity, I would say that group sporting events are overall productive from a sociological perspective, be it IPL cricket or Fortnite tournaments.
TikTok is clearly and quite obviously towards the junkie dance scale of things.
From an experiential position there was not much of a difference between my observations of a woman filming herself doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world and the junky on the next block doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This basic object-level assessment of the actions that we and others experience with our physical bodies is core to the very notion of “meaning”. The “meaning” is just the stoned dance.
I know of no junkies famous for only being junkies but there are definitely TikTokers famous for only being TikTokers so don’t confuse this for some strict equivalence.
I’m just trying to establish a kind of framework for discussing the relationship between productive UI and productive software tools.
A hammer is useful for doing stuff, which modern UIs increasingly aren't. So it seems they aren't hammers.
B) if you're doing dev work, you're probably not entirely cognizant of how different your software selection and usage patterns are than most people's, even for non-dev things.
C) there's a whole lot of interfaces out there and the great ones work so naturally and intuitively that you don't even notice them. Those are the ones for which many assume the design decisions were so obvious that they didn't even need designers. That's so so not true.Look at the most popular user-facing software: web browsers are all obsessed with usability (mozilla actually does some of the best open usability research out there.) Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, et al... Incredibly clear and usable for their target market. Can't get much higher contrast than you do in email applications and other communication apps. There are tools to guage if your text color/background color/ and text size make for readable text according to the WCAG and I have never had a job, either as a designer or as a developer, where AA compliance wasn't a minimum for all functional elements. Most common user-facing interfaces that regularly use light or white text on colored backgrounds, like the iMessage interface or signal, benefit from OS-level accessibility enhancements like increased text size, which are very commonly used among the people who need them. My non-tech-savvy elderly relatives all knew about them through the setup process on their devices when they first bought them, and never looked back. Looking through every communication or other popular user-facing software package on my Galaxy U22 using a default theme shows nothing even remotely low-contrast.
This blind appeal to authority shouldn't convince anyone.
You haven't actually made an argument worth arguing about. It's devoid of value and it's not a productive addition to the conversation.
And don't bother wasting any more of my time. I don't care. You clearly have nothing to say.
This does not excuse making terrible user experiences elsewhere.
I have used MacOS every day for 10 years and i've never, except in exceptional circumstances, used the scrollbar to scroll. I don't see anybody in my circle using it. They all have the "Only Show When Scrolling" setting on.
I don't think this is ridiculous and I would enable the setting if turned off by default.
I also spend 99% percent of my time in full-screen mode in safari, vscode or terminal. So the top bar is also hidden by default. I think this is much more focused.
It is a choice, you can turn it on or off.