I guess it comes down to personal taste. I for one like that they hide away, and I can bring them back just by holding down for two fingers on my trackpad.
Thankfully you can make scroll bars persistent in System Preferences.
Thankfully you can make scroll bars persistent in System Preferences.
It's just simply a bad decision. There shouldn't be a preference, it should just be on by default, end of story. It only makes sense on iPads.
The fact that it's auto-hide by default means that most mac owners will just simply have their machines set to auto-hide the scrollbar, and very likely have no idea that a setting exists- Then blame it all on the content owners for making a bad/hard to use site. (especially if they decide they want a scrollable pane with OS specific scrollbars on it)
To expand a little bit, even something as seemingly arbitrary, like driving on the right or left side of the road, is not a matter of preference. If you pick the wrong one in a certain country, you can equally get yourself killed as with your other more obviously wrong "preferences". There is value in having everything work in a standard way.
You missed my point. Just invoking the word "preference" is a weak argument. You need something more like an actual argument. With evidence and logic.
All recent (less than 3 years) Apple devices are sold either as touch devices or with touch enabled peripherals. Gestural interaction is the default paradigm of interaction on iOS/OS X (this is also true of Android devices). These users are largely used to this behavior, which can be changed if there is a desire to do so. This behavior does not affect users of other systems that don't support gestural interaction. There is no need therefore to cater specifically for Apple (or other) users as they, through daily interaction with their device, will intuit what to do. It puzzles me why the scrollbar still exists as an interaction device elsewhere. I really had to think about where and how they appear because I am so used to them simply not being there.
Perhaps you are looking at them in the wrong way. Where once the scrollbar was used for scrolling, it is now used to indicate the position the reader has reached on a page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6247596
though, if you are on a mac, I can understand if you missed that whole post.
Watch a child use touch-based interface. It's enlightening. They intuit the required interaction with consummate ease. Having observed how individuals still use scroll bars by tapping on the arrows and not realising that it's quicker to grab the bar, to me illustrates that using and relying on scroll bars is as much a learned behaviour, and a less intuitive one at that.
I think a more important question is, what kind of design are you using that people can not instinctually figure out that they need to scroll? If your site needs to be scrolled horizontally (and its not painfully obvious that that's the case) it's a bad design. And if your user can not figure out that they need to scroll vertically, the are an idiot, or it's a truly bad design. In the former case, stop catering to the stupidest 5% of the population. Just like with people who use IE 7 in 2013, you'll never be able to properly serve them. And if its because of your design, redesign the damn site rather then pushing your preference onto the user.
If anything that is not obviously harmful can be reduced to mere "preference" then what is the point of hiring designers? just deliver raw html code and a textfield for users to write in their own css, right?
Of course, I admit this is reducing the argument to absurdity, but so is calling my position "fascism".
In truth, as product designers we make all kinds of decisions on behalf of our users. We use a system of judgement to rank the "goodness" and the "badness" of those decisions based on whether they make our user's lives easier or harder. (or make us more or less money, depending on your ethos)
In what way does hiding the scrollbar improve anyone's lives? In the cases where it demonstrably makes user's lives harder, explain why that doesn't matter?
1. this, and other "preferences" are not arbitrary or meaningless. They have real consequences (even if the only real consequence is minor annoyance)
2. the presentation of too many choices is in fact, a real and well documented anti-pattern in UI-design. Too many choices is cognitive overload. Programmers like choices. programmers like power. but ordinary mortals don't care what colour their window title bars are, as long as the colour doesn't get in the way of their job.
3. Given the above, it is the UI designer's responsibility to be very opinionated about what the defaults of a system should be, and what should be configurable as a choice. (the fewer choices the better, generally, from a design perspective.)
4. as a corollary to that, I am aware that "some people" are uncomfortable about Apple's lack of configuration options. Those people are not designers, and should not ever be put in the position of designing a UI. Or you end up with a monstrosity like the desktop linux ecosystem. It's essentially an argument from ignorance of the research.
That's a belief. I don't see any argument here. Why is it a mistake?
Perhaps modern users, not tied to a legacy of scrollbars, could not care less about them? Perhaps 95% of users (with the exception of hackers) not even use them or notice them when they are there?
>Those people are not designers, and should not ever be put in the position of designing a UI.
Whereas you are? And we should take your opinion on scrollbars over Apple designer's one, because?
Pros:
Looks tidier sometimes
Causes frustration and confusion.
> Whereas you are?
yes
> And we should take your opinion on scrollbars over Apple designer's one, because?
because I am right and Apple is wrong.
On top of that, the reaction to my position is so weird. Oh Zen, if you had your way we would be FORCED by your tyrannical fascist ways to look at ugly scrollbars ALL the time instead of just some of the time. :(
A, ok then. Case closed.
Nearly every time I see someone talking about "design" in the realm of user interfaces, or about making software "beautiful", they're invariably attempting to use concepts applicable to media intended for the presentation of information to a viewer in the context of an interface intended to facilitate dynamic interaction between a functional tool and the user, and it always seems to make the software more limited, less productive, and more frustrating to use.
A user interface is about exposing software functionality and enabling users to maximize their efficient use of their tools. Optimizing a UI to look good in a screenshot means not optimizing the UI to provide efficient access to the functionality of the application, and not optimizing the flexibility of the application for users to adapt it to their own priorities and work styles.
This trend of attempting to exercise top-down control over user experience needs to end, and software developers need to start paying attention to what users are actually trying to do with the products they build, instead of deferring to inappropriately-applied theoretical models offered by visual designers.
If you have found a "Designer" who is overly concerned with how it looks and not so much how it works, the conclusion to reach is that you have found a bad designer, not that all "designers" are concerned only with aesthetics.
People who call themselves "designers" in this context, and at the present moment, generally are prioritizing screenshot aesthetics over functional utility, and we're getting worse software because of it.
Except, that in the case of the designers, since the person giving the interview also does not know what design actually entails, they get hired.
The situation has led to actual designers inventing a new title to give themselves "UX", which I predict will also quickly get watered down to mean basically nothing.
It's kind of really sad. and frustrating.
Another problem is a real designer, calling themselves a designer, gets hired by an organisation that has the wrong idea about what a designer does, and so gets pigeonholed out of any important decision making processes, and only is allowed to be involved at the very end of the process.
A very good designer can get around this, but they often don't have much power in the organisation to do anything about this pigeonholing.
On the other hand, the presence of this option causes confusion and frustration, and, one could argue, significant economic harm as a result of the confusion and frustration.
Why is your preference (which you have not, and possibly cannot explain) more important than the confusion and frustration of everyone else?
Instead of arguing about your clear authoritarian tendencies, here is my main reasons why I think hiding scroll bars is a good idea:
1. Information Overload: You should only show user information when they need it. Users need to know how much of the document is remaining, or where they are currently located, when they are scrolling. If they need the data, they are but a touch away from it.
2. Scroll Bars create anxiety in users who are actually reading your website. If you are under slight time pressure, as most of us are at all times, you will concentrate on your own progress through the page, rather then engaging with the content.
3. Shifting: Even on operating systems where it is the convention to always show the scroll bar, the scroll bar still disappears when there is no scrollable content. Many, websites are centered, and they have a tendency to shift the center of the website by the width of the website when the scrollbar appears and disappears. I find that behavior annoying.
4. Shifting in text boxes: when the scroll bar appears, once you typed enough text to fill the box, the text has to reflow, in order to accommodate the new scroll bar. I find this very annoying and distracting.
Finally, you keep referring to these mythical, internally confused people who keep reading only the tops of all the news articles and constantly wonder why the rest is cut off. Can you show me the following:
1. Any site that looks confusing on a mac without scroll bars. Something I can show to people and gauge their reaction.
2. Any study, article, or survey done on the subject that states that it's a severe problem. Not personal anecdotes, but actual evidence of some kind.
it's just, that you were supposed to scroll to actually read it. There was no way you could have known, since you're on a mac.
I would like to add that your use of the word "fascist" and "authoritarian" is a grave disrespect to those who are survivors of authoritarian regimes. If I were you I would think much more carefully before throwing such words around over scrollbar preferences
After that happens a couple of times, they eventually find their way to the System Preferences.