> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base
Maybe I don't understand completely what he is referring to, but on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold.
Scrollbars used to be sometimes useful to get a sense of how much content there is. But everyone using infinite scroll broke that, not apple.
Mobile touch screens aren't really the issue here - the problem is mouse users on laptops, where they don't get to touch the screen to discover elements and they need to be able to interact with a visible scrollbar in order to scroll.
I'm not a mouse user so this issue caught me completely off guard!
Need to is pretty strong. My company did UX testing on scroll bars and the overwhelming majority of our users on laptop scroll using the keyboard or the scroll wheel (which on laptop is done using two finger dragging). I forget the exact number but it was less than 10% of users actually interact with the scrollbar.
Not interacting with it doesn't mean you don't use it - I glance at it to see if there is more content and where in it I am, even though I use the scroll wheel to move.
Not only that, but seeing the scrollbar tells you that there is more content that you can't see.
This is especially useful if you made your modern front page super fancy so that the above-the-fold space looks like a tidy complete package. Or if you have a sub-panel containing a list of something.
I make web sites for students. I've frequently found that, if it's necessary to have a scrollable list of something, I need to dynamically change the height of stuff so that the list starts with some list item partially peeking out over the fold, otherwise half the users with hidden scrollbars won't know to scroll and find more stuff.
Modern web pages get me on this every time - I filed multiple bugs on our new site because there was so much whitespace that I didn't realize there was more content below the fold.
I suppose this has made "above the fold" more valuable, or perhaps mobile devices show so little content that everyone has to scroll ...
I just realized that the "mobile-first" web has made using a computer with large screens a super-power. I have 17m pixels (and many more if I wasn't using Retina-like resolutions to get crisper text) - others I work with are stuck at barely over a million pixels.
This makes no sense to me. Why can't I look at the scrollbar(s) and see where I am in the document without scrolling? Why is it important that this information be hidden from me?
The scrollbar doesn't just let you know that you can scroll, it shows you the size of the content in relation to the size of your viewing window, and it shows you
the location of the viewing window within the overall content, and it does this at a glance. A scrollbar is an extremely efficient use of screen space.
Don't hide things from the user that provide the user with information.
You can do that to, moving your mouse over the window reveals the scrollbars, as does scrolling.
The reason we hide the scrollbars is because scrollbars are not the one and only consideration that we make when designing a page, information density also matters and so we have to weigh these options together and conduct user testing to see what the impact of various design decisions are. Certainly there is a vocal minority of people who are dead set that scrollbars must always be visible, and we can respect their choice, but we also have to optimize our software for the majority of our users who would rather see more content.
The balance we went with was if you want to see the scrollbar, you need to perform an action that engages it, which is moving your mouse over the scrollable area, or performing a scroll operation. We have other things too that we have to consider, like until the mouse approaches the scrollbar it appears very thin and when the mouse is within a certain distance it expands to allow it to moved.
Will every single user like this approach? No of course not. But based on our user testing, it optimized for metrics that we care about.
> You can do that to, moving your mouse over the window reveals the scrollbars, as does scrolling.
The problem with revealing scrollbars it that they then obscure whatever was shown there before. (Or reflow the page, dear god). If you use that space, well you can't see it when you're scrolling; and if you don't use that space why not show the scrollbar the whole time?
Name me 3 websites/application where hiding the scrollbar is used for more content. Please don't use examples where is's obvious you can scroll. (ie Timeseries/tables).
> Don't hide things from the user that provide the user with information.
We already hide 99.9999% of things that provide the user with information. Thank god, because the real maxim should be don't overload the user with information.
We try to show only the things that show the most useful information at the times it's needed, and hide them the rest of the time.
Scroll bars used to be necessary primarily for scrolling. Once people switched to scroll wheels and trackpad gliding this the primary use case disappeared.
Knowing where in the document you are isn't usually that useful. You started at the top and already know how much you've read. For the infrequent moments where you really do need to know, just jiggle the scroll and you can see it instantly.
It's a very elegant solution. It really does work.
Why is hiding the scrollbar(s) today so necessary for real estate reclamation, when it wasn't necessary when 1024x768 was an above average screen size?
Mice with scroll wheels existed then, and were common, at least in Alaska, where I was at the time.
It's only in the last few years of computers with mouse-driven GUIs that suddenly the scrollbar is intolerable for UX people. Suddenly users are saying that a scrollbar is unacceptable? Really? Or are the survey questions worded to produce the results desired by the designer? The latter seems much more likely. (It's hard NOT to bias survey questions, if you don't know how easy it is to bias them accidentally.)
I can't believe that is the honest truth of the situation. I worked with my fair share of excellent designers, and I can't recall any of them ever groaning about any browser chrome, like a scroll bar, ever, with the notable exception of the viewable page space consumed by browser plugins which each added their own toolbar to the browser UI itself. What a horrid period of time that was...
If it is such an urgent need, where was that need 20 years ago? The web hasn't changed THAT MUCH. Scroll bars were an accepted thing; unquestioned. But today they're too intrusive? Or they consume too much space? What the?
I understand that the science of interactivity has matured, so I'm willing to admit that we know more about how users behave than we did 20 years ago. I still don't believe that any UI would ever benefit from hidden scroll bars over always visible scroll bars.
> We already hide 99.9999% of things that provide the user with information. Thank god, because the real maxim should be don't overload the user with information
> We try to show only the things that show the most useful information at the times it's needed, and hide them the rest of the time.
Surely there's a middle ground between showing a user everything and showing a user practically nothing and then trying to guess what they might need.
Software that tries to figure out what I want instead of just letting me just pick what I want is, frankly, annoying. How does software handle a situation where an option I might want is hidden because I have a use case that the developers didn't anticipate?
> Knowing where in the document you are isn't usually that useful.
Disagree. If I'm reading a document on the Internet, I probably don't know how long it is before I start reading it (and those ridiculous tags that say an article is XX minutes long are almost always so wrong that they're useless for me). If I'm scrolling with my scroll wheel, I'm probably not paying attention to the scroll bar. If I've been reading said document for fifteen minutes and I want to know approximately how far into the document I've read (and if I have any hope of finishing it up in the time before I have to do something else) the position of the box in the scroll bar is a great way for me estimate that at a glance. Jiggling the page or moving the mouse all the way to the side or doing some other incantation to make it appear completely breaks my flow reading the document and can make me easily lose my place (especially if I'm in the middle of a paragraph). A quick glance at the scroll bar also breaks the flow, but not quite as badly, and it's a lot easier to resume where I left off.
> Surely there's a middle ground between showing a user everything and showing a user practically nothing and then trying to guess what they might need.
Yes, that's what software already does. And a scroll bar that appears but only when you jiggle the scroll is that middle ground.
> Software that tries to figure out what I want instead of just letting me just pick what I want is, frankly, annoying.
That's literally all software though.
Otherwise every screen would be covered in every possible option, and would be unusable.
The use case didn't disappear. If you're looking at a very long list - could be a document, could be a list of files - it's simply quicker to scan it by scrolling than by finger-gliding. Especially with the Magic Mouse.
It's physically tiring to scroll through a long document with multiple finger drags on the surface of the mouse. And knowing how much there is left to look at is clearly useful.
Worse, the default MacOS micro-scroll bars are too narrow even when they're visible. I assume this is to encourage track pad and finger-drag use - but that's not a user-centric decision.
This is how chrome does it to. The first time you scroll a little you see how long the page is. You don't need to keep seeing something that doesn't change.
The funny thing is, if scroll bars never existed and someone tried to add them they would be considered terrible UI.
You need to hit a tiny target with your mouse, that gets smaller and smaller in proportion to the size of the document. Missing the scroll bar, and hitting the gutter moves you to a random page with no simple way to get back.
On small documents a small mouse movement scrolls by a small amount, but on a large document a small mouse movement can scroll way too fast.
On some systems clicking the gutter is "page down". On others it is "move to this relative point in the document".
With a mouse wheel or track pad the scroll speed is consistent no matter the size of the document, and the user can scroll faster or slower very easily. And you have a huge target - the entire document. There is no chance of paging when you mean to scroll. Scrollbars are obsolete.
Scrollbars aren't meant to be clicked ever since the invention of the mouse wheel. Their primary job is to tell you that you can scroll, because there's more content. If you hide the scrollbar until you scroll, then users often won't scroll, because they won't know there is more to see.
The secondary job of the scrollbar is to tell you where you are in relation to the content, and how much of it there is, relative to what you see on your screen. Both of these roles are best fulfilled when the indicator is persistently visible.
You could make scrollbars transparent to clicks and they'd do 90% of their job already. The ability to click on them to quickly jump to a desired location is a useful bonus, even if not frequently used these days. What matters is that they're visible.
>If you hide the scrollbar until you scroll, then users often won't scroll, because they won't know there is more to see.
Do you have evidence for this, even if it's anecdotal? To be honest a statement like that sounds like a hypothesis and a reasonable hypothesis, but I am not joking when I say when we did user testing, it was absolutely never the case that someone actually didn't scroll because they didn't see a scroll bar. Now we didn't test specifically for that but I'd be surprised if a controlled experiment testing that hypothesis concluded that people will actually just never bother to scroll unless they explicitly see a scrollbar.
Scrolling is actually a very natural thing that people do without the need to visibly see a scrollbar. Using a dedicated scroll button or gesture is a very cheap and consequence free action to perform. I'd be very surprised if you have data that contradicts this and indicates that an actual human being would simply not scroll because the only visual cue/indicator that people use is a scrollbar, rather than the multitude of context specific information available to indicate whether more content is available.
I only have anecdotes to support this, but unless I'm a really weird outlier, I'd say it's indicative:
- Almost every discussion on Apple and scrollbars I see on-line has someone telling a story of how they didn't realize some app was scrollable, because its visual grid happened to align perfectly with viewport size of their iPhone/iPad;
- I got caught myself by this a few times on PC, where the design of the page looked complete, scollbars were hidden, and I didn't realize I could scroll down;
- I've been the person to tell some confused non-technical people that they could scroll down to see more, because the layout of a webpage did not make this obvious, and without a scrollbar visible, they were just puzzled why there's so little information on the screen.
Plural of anecdote is not data, so I'm open to the possibility I may have just had peculiar luck, but I think it's fair to assign a low prior to that.
> that an actual human being would simply not scroll because the only visual cue/indicator that people use is a scrollbar, rather than the multitude of context specific information available to indicate whether more content is available
What these cases had in common was that there was insufficient context-specific information available to make it apparent the content is scrollable (and - anecdotally, again - in my experience, non-tech-savvy people don't have the nervous tick of just randomly scrolling on the wheel, to check if it does something). Sometimes, the only such contextual information was the feeling you got after reading everything on the page, that something is missing. But if your users have to reach that point to figure out they can try scrolling, the UI failed at its job, and wasted them a minute of their lives.
The worst offender I've seen is the share button on the iphone. You can scroll down to select more sharing options, but the first row of options aligns perfectly with the bottom of the screen. I've seen at least two people have no idea there are more options.
Is that how it works on macOS? If so, it's plainly broken.
On Windows, and in every Linux GUI framework I can think of, clicking anywhere above or below the scroll thumb scrolls exactly one screen page up or down, for the very reason you've described. To navigate to an arbitrary spot, you're supposed to drag the thumb.
On GNU/Linux systems, at least, you middle-click to say 'go to this place'.
I love my scrollbars, and I want them always visible. I don't use the mouse often, and I certainly don't want to have to use the mouse just to see context.
Chrome implemented even worse nasties on GNU/Linux with scrollbars though, including forcing a snapback to original position if you drag the scrollbar but happen to move the mouse a few pixels too far left or right of the scrollbar [1]. Apparently that's how Microsoft Windows users do things. So now we have to as well.
Windows does it, but "too far" is actually closer to 500 pixels, not "a few". You'll certainly never run into it in normal use. I actually find it useful because I can refer to two places in the same document without losing my scroll position (I don't think that's its intended purpose, but it works).
macOS can be set to either behave the way you're describing when you click above or below the scroll thumb, or to navigate to that point in the document when you do that (e.g., click 80% of the way down the scrollbar and jump to the 80% point in the document).
I think the point is that I don't necessarily know by looking at a page that there is anything to scroll to without seeing the scroll bar. I may land on a page that contains enough content "above the fold" that it appears that's all the content available, so I navigate away without scrolling down to discover the additional content below.
It's possible the first time you go to a page or use new software that this is true, but for desktop productivity software that is repeatedly used on a daily basis, you usually come to identify multiple cues to know if there is more content, so hiding one specific cue in a specific circumstance won't inhibit your ability to use our software.
People's preferences about usability can change over the course of familiarizing themselves with your software, things that are friendly when they first use the software may end up being useless as they become more familiar with it. We obviously don't want to make our software hostile to new users, but for our purpose we want to ensure that people who are more familiar with our software have the optimal experience.
Hiding relevant information from the user is a bad idea. The computer is a tool that the user employs to accomplish a task. Do not hide tools from people who need to use the tools.
A computer is a tool. It's not a design statement. It is not a canvas on which you paint. It is a toolbox full of tools a user needs to do work. Treat it as such, please.
The scrollbar is still there if you really want to use it, it's just not always visible. You can always move your mouse over to it and use it like always, but it's not going to appear unless it's being engaged in some way.
In many cases yes we do that too. Text is hidden until the user performs an action, types something in, or hovers/focuses over an element (think tooltip).
Why... (Tooltips I understand, as those are often something you only need a single time.)
Yes I am a vocal opponent of hidden UI elements. Shame on me, I guess.
If I were the innocent target of a firing squad, I would be a vocal opponent of the actions being taken against me there, too. "It's just a vocal minority. Fire."
Being a vocal minority doesn't make me wrong. But it probably means I have thought about the problem space more than those who are not. At that point you put the A/B testing aside and you talk to the people and listen to them, and see if they are informed or if they are crackpots.
For the simple reason that we want to present to the user only the information that is necessary for them to accomplish their immediate goal, and nothing more.
If you aren't scrolling, then the scrollbar provides little information in proportion to the amount of space it consumes. If you are scrolling, then the scrollbar is very important and it gets displayed. If you want to know where in a document you are, our experience is that users tend to already have a good idea of where in a document they are based on multiple cues including the fact that they are likely the ones who positioned themselves to that point in the document already. In the very rare moments where they need that cue, they can move their mouse (scrollbar appears when the mouse moves).
As screens are a finite resource, by minimizing information that isn't necessary towards accomplishing a goal, we can maximize the information that is.
If you are reclaiming the sliver of space occupied by a scrollbar because you need it to display other information, do you also do this on high resolution displays where the scrollbar does not consume as large of a fraction of available space, or do you just apply the rule no matter the situation?
I would genuinely love to see a UI where valuable information is unavailable without scrolling because of the presence of a scroll bar. I am not being sarcastic or snarky. I would love to see that UI
Sure, this is what our current software looks like but it's in the process of being redesigned:
[1] is an image comparing a list of trades with and without the scrollbar. The scrollbar literally hides an entire column's worth of data.
[2] is an image of a typical trader's layout so you can get a sense of the context and how the size of a scrollbar can add up.
As you can see, given that the scrollbar consumes around 20% of the width of a trade list, by eliminating it a user can can add one additional trade window for every 5 that are open. That's literally money in their pocket and our pocket.
Some additional info is that the Windows 10 titlebar is too tall and those minimize/maximize buttons are enormous, so we redesigned a new title bar that is not only slimmer, but allows us to make better use of it while still retaining the functionality. I am not going to declare that we are the masters of UX and everything we decide is absolutely correct, but we do really care about these issues because they make a measurable impact on our performance.
Alright. I had a feeling you were in stock trading. Those users are power users (truly) and know what they are asking for.
That said, almost all of those windows in the "typical usage" image have space enough to display everything fully AND show a scrollbar. And I would imagine a trader would shrink those windows enough to allow another window or two in the row, and be very happy without a scrollbar.
On another topic, I have an AutoHotKey script that, with some modification, may be of extreme use to those people. Felt appropriate to inform you of it.
Don't worry, they're killing that too, with infiniscroll!
Seriously, that's another thing I hate about infiniscroll: if I come to a giant list where I know I've looked at the top 10% of, it makes it impossible to jump down approximately 10%, or otherwise to a region I know I haven't explored.
Edit: And, of course, if you do want to go n% down, there's no choice but to page down, wait, page down, wait, page down ...
The #1 thing I hate about infiniscroll (and I actually kinda like it when I'm vegetating and pouring crappy content directly into my eyes) is that clicking on something and then hitting back almost always takes you back to the top of the list; at which point I bounce out and never return.
However, that one I blame the browsers for. I distinctly remember the back button working differently, where it would reliably take you to the exact state of the previous page, just as if you had opened the current link a new tab and closed it, but it changed at some point, and most sites do something that destroys the state when you back into them as well.
As a user of a laptop, the reason I use arrow keys to scroll is because of infinite scroll. Websites with that feature are effectively unusable via the scrollbar because it gets hijacked as you're in the middle of using it, move from 50% to 25%, and suddenly you're pressing down on 50% of double the original lines and get jerked past a quarter of the open entries in your feed. It's a terrible experience that forces you to use arrows or the scroll wheel as a workaround, not because that is an actual preference.
Quantitative finance where information density is of the utmost importance and our interest isn't in getting the most number of users, it's retaining the most skilled users.
For our application we have many tables of data that are narrow in size, maybe two or three columns, and having a scrollbar constantly displayed takes up valuable screen real estate that could be used to display more tables.
It's also a fallacy to think that because we optimize our application for 90% of users, that we end up losing 10% of them. People are not static automatons that make binary decisions about using your product strictly on the basis of how scrollbars function. People are fairly flexible and can adapt, get used to new things, and balance many different factors against one another when making choices.
This goes against the rule of thumb where if 5% of attendees are vegetarian you serve vegetarian and omnivores will adjust to it, while if you served the omnivore option the vegetarians would likely go hungry (more likely go find something else nearby if possible).
No because it's not as extreme as that. What you are talking about something that Taleb talks about which is a kind of minority rule [1] where for example kosher people will not eat food that isn't kosher, but non-kosher people will eat food that is kosher and so the end result is that Coca-cola, Pepsi, etc... all ensure their products are kosher even though only like 1 percent of their customers care about it.
That is a very important principle in UI design and we certainly adhere to it and take it into account, but this has nothing to do with that. We're talking about scrollbars here, and unfortunately the people who prefer to always see a scrollbar are not going to ditch your product strictly on that one single criteria.
If the business is "restaurants", but if it's "programming language conferences" I don't think vegetarians are going to start picking up C++ because PyCon didn't have a vegetarian option. No one is picking software based on scrollbar preferences just like no one is picking software conferences based on their dietary restrictions.
But unlike Apple or most other replies in this thread, your case has a valid justification: omitting scrollbar increases information density and usability, which are good things. I'm also guessing you train new users, so that there's no possibility they won't realize some table isn't scrollable just because there's no scrollbar.
We don't know Apple's justification for it but I wouldn't be surprised if their testing concluded something similar to ours... users don't depend on an always visible scrollbar to scroll.
It would be crazy to ignore 10% of the user base--to provide them no means to use your product or some features therein. However, it's not crazy to reprioritize their preferences. This happens all the time, and rightly so--if you can choose between delivering real functional value for a supermajority of users or cater to usability preferences of 10% of users, the former should win every time.
Note also the distinction between "prefers scrollbar" and "touched the scrollbar at all". At most 10% of users prefer scroll bar; the parent only claimed that 10% of users touched the scroll bar at all.
if you can choose between delivering real functional value for a supermajority of users or cater to usability preferences of 10% of users, the former should win every time
Not "every" time. I work in healthcare. I don't have the luxury of leaving ANYONE out.
I'm talking about preferences, not accessibility requirements. And healthcare is one of the most dramatic examples of giving no shits about preferences (I also work in healthcare, but on the provider side, not the consumer side)--my major hospital chain's web portal deliberately breaks on browsers (and versions) that it doesn't explicitly support. You certainly don't have to support scrollbars unless they're billed as an accessibility requirement.
Healthcare is certainly a "fun" space, but catering to scrollbar purists isn't usually part of the gig. :)
> I'm talking about preferences, not accessibility requirements.
It's not clear to me that those two things are neatly separated. I have a ~25th percentile visual memory - my brain does very poorly having to process and retain images, but text is very easy. I can, eventually, navigate visually, but at a much higher energy cost than the average. Is my affinity for text a preference or an accessibility concern?
I wouldn’t be surprised if some tiny portion of the population could legitimately claim an accessibility reason for scrollbars, however tenuous. But certainly not 10% or even 10% of 10%. Further, “accessibility requirements” refers to explicit, medically diagnosed issues not speculation about a preferences vs needs continuum. Moreover, as previously mentioned, accessibility requirements are out of scope—the assumption is that we’re talking about (at most) 10% of users who have a simple preference or custom for scrollbars. If we’re talking about accessibility the calculus is different, but that’s a distinct topic for another thread.
Nearly every industry. Pareto optimization implies that in almost all circumstances you get more bang for the buck investing in improving the experience of your 90% of users than the remaining 10%.
Seems a bit hypocritical to me, since I have hardly ever met a startup programmer/sales person that cares about the accessibility for disabled people of their product.
> less than 10% of users actually interact with the scrollbar.
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.
To be honest most of our tests for UI components are fairly abstract which has pros and cons. The way we test UIs is by creating multiple prototypes that differ in various ways (hidden vs. not hidden scrollbar), giving the user time to familiarize themselves with the prototype, and then asking them to perform a series of tasks. For example after asking them to familiarize themselves with an abstract spreadsheet like software, we might ask them to find a specific data item and we check how they go about it. Or we might give them a form and ask them to fill it out and we see their usage. Or we might present to them a large set of changing data, ask them to mentally keep track of any numbers that change to be between 100 and 200, and after 2 minutes we ask them how many numbers did they see and measure that, then we change the UI (increase information density) and have them repeat it and see what the effect is.
After we give this to a bunch of our users, for our specific business, we split users up according to a bunch of criteria including people who performed the task the fastest in terms of time, performed it using the fewest actions, in terms of precision, sometimes eye tracking is important, and a host of things.
Now the next thing I will admit people will find distasteful but for our industry it matters a lot... we then design the software according to how the "optimal" users accomplished the task. Sometimes it's possible most users accomplished the task one way, but the optimal users accomplished it another way... in many cases we will then design our software for the optimal users even if they are a minority.
For this case we were predominantly interested in information density and the scrollbar was taking up about 10% of the width of a table (on 96 DPI the scrollbar is I think around 15px and the window as a whole is about 150px). The optimal users, and the vast majority of users overall tasked to find data in a table as well as the ones who did best in terms of keeping track of changing numbers, don't move the mouse over a scrollbar and use it directly. I don't have all the details off the top of my head although I could ask the UX researcher about it if there's a lot of interest, but I seem to recall that the small number of users who did drag the scrollbar are "clumsier" and slower.
Since I work in quantitative finance, it's better for our business to design our software to appeal to the so called optimal user and try to find ways to get the majority of our users to adopt more optimal usage patterns. That means if we can get our users to prefer using more precise ways of using our software through familiarity, training, or other means, we'd rather get them to do that instead of trying to design our software to accommodate usage patterns that they are currently comfortable with, but that we measure as being suboptimal.
None of this is perfect, we don't always get it right, but we do care about it and put quite a lot of effort into it and have seen a lot of substantive improvements in our users that translate to substantial earnings for our trading firm.
Fascinating! Could you tell me more about who these optimal users are? Are they optimal because they are the most valued users in their firms? (Make the best trades or some such?) are they optimal as their opinion on the software matters a lot? Or something else entirely that I am failing to imagine
Would be curious to see the results controlling for page size and for type of task. For example, I normally don't use the scrollbar... until I do (because I'm scrubbing a huge page looking for some specific thing). And then I get annoyed that grabbing the darn scrollbar handle with a touchpad feels like a dumb peekaboo game.
90% of users don't use the scrollbar on laptop/desktop? I find that hard to believe unless your apps don't really need a scrollbar to see all the options.
If you're on a Mac with a trackball, the scroll bars would show up all the time the same way they would if you were using a mouse. Unless the trackball says it has a scrollable function to the OS, you'd see the bar.
I never used a trackball, but I would have expected there to be either a button on the mouse or some key you could hold to turn the ball into scroll mode?
A search on Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg for trackball and sorting the results from lowest to highest price all include scrolling buttons, either by touch, scroll ring, scroll wheel. The dirt cheapest option I could find for 20 bucks, the Logitech Trackman Trackball has something called WebScroll buttons and other cheap Logitech trackballs use SetPoint.
It appears, at least from all the evidence I can gather, that trackballs without a scroll option is a very rare exception and would need to be from a model older than 10 years.
Ah I see you don't work at CD Projekt Red - where they decided to hard-bind "use" in Cyperpunk 2077 to the middle mouse button which many mice have problems detecting due to prioritizing wheel smoothness over clickability. My partner had to borrow a different mouse to make it through the tutorial - after which it allows you to rebind the button.
The game doesn't let you rebind keys until after the tutorial? That's insane. So anyone who needs some unconventional control setup cannot play the game. Not to mention the tutorial is supposed to be the part that lets you test out the settings and familiarise yourself with the basics.
Those scrollwheels you described are definitely part of the problem too, though. I had the pleasure of using one like that and a few minutes were enough to generate the urge to throw it in the bin. It's already hard enough to find a decent mouse without worrying about the scrollwheel.
We absolutely did. As I indicated in another reply, we develop quantitative trading software and we use our own software internally as a trading firm. While we're not perfect by any means, we take UX research quite seriously.
I think mouse users don't generally suffer from this problem: by default, MacOS always shows a scrollbar in all contexts if you have a mouse plugged in to your computer.
A customer of mine was surprised to see some extra VMs in vSphere a few days ago. He never tried to scroll a list somewhere in the app and always missed the extra content because his Mac doesn't display the scrollbar. He has a laptop, so no mouse. I tweaked my Gnome desktop to always display a transparent scrollbar (only the outline is visible) so I could see that the list had extra elements.
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.
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.
I enable persistent scrollbars on any machine where I'm doing front-end web dev, so that I can better see what (some of) my users will see (not doing this has bitten me when it affected layout). But on my personal laptop I leave the scrollbars off. I virtually never drag them with the mouse these days and they just clutter my visual landscape; I'm glad the option is there to hide them (and dear god would they get in the way on the already-limited real estate of a phone screen).
Not GP, but I pretty much only ever use the mouse/trackpad for testing from a user perspective or in some apps that don’t have good keyboard support.
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.
I've had two separate users tell me that they use a mouse and they can't my scroll tables horizontally without first scrolling to the bottom of the page.
I like a UI that lets you scroll in every direction by clicking and holding the middle mouse wheel/button down. This is a more precise gesture than any trackpad can offer. Plus, with a vertical mouse you won't be killing your rotator cuff.
In web browsers this is referred to as "auto scrolling" and it works automatically on Windows but on Linux I have to install a chrome extension to get that feature in Chrome at least. It works in Firefox.
Not sure if it works on my Mac because I gave up trying to use third-party peripherals on Macs since they never work well.
It's a precise gesture, meaning that it happens when you want it to happen and not any other time.
I certainly cannot say the same for scrolling with a trackpad. If I happen to brush two fingers on the thing, things start scrolling when I don't want them to.
I can scroll horizontally on my touchpad, but on a mouse it doesn't work. Horizontal scroll wheels are rare (the Logitech Master series has them, but that's about it). Most apps allow you to hold ctrl while using the scroll wheel to scroll horizontally. Some implement some kind of drag-mechanic, but that feels incredibly awkward with a mouse and is unusable with a touchpad.
On some mice they do, and it's a really useful feature. But it's fairly niche and mostly on the more expensive mice. I would feel pretty confident betting that over 99% of Windows users don't have a tiltable scroll wheel.
Even though I have trackball with tilt wheel (MX Ergo), I noticed that I never use them. When I should scroll vertically, I just middle click and move cursor, or grab scrollbar and drag. Maybe because tilting wheel isn't comfortable way to scroll.
I don't exactly like invisible scrollbars either (and it sucks that Gtk+3/Adwaita has adopted thin/invisible scrollbars in Linux) but modern mice have dedicated scroll wheels.
> It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold.
I feel like the big argument here is that it is often not clear. Maybe a scroll bar "wastes" too much space, but watching mobile device users you can sort of see there needs to be some sort of system-wide scroll indicator. A lot of mobile users have nervous habits/tics of randomly scrolling every screen of every application they use. It doesn't waste a lot of time in a day, but it makes everyone look nervous or mentally ill and it's a bunch of papercuts better interface design could solve.
When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view. A lot of people found that aesthetically displeasing for whatever reasons, but it certainly was a good scroll indicator. Even mobile devices could use something to avoid the "random swipe syndrome" that seems to plague mobile users.
> When Microsoft briefly flirted most directly with hidden scrollbars by default in Windows 8 their design guidelines required that grids never align perfectly to available viewport so that stuff always "peaked out" if there was something to scroll into view.
And that was good advice. Because whenever there's a thread on Apple and scrollbars on the Internet, I can find someone telling a story of how they never knew some app was scrollable, because the grid aligned perfectly with their iPhone/iPad viewport.
I guess it depends quite a bit on usage types. I don’t use many web apps, don’t visit many product and landing pages. Probably 90% of the sites I visit on mobile are news sites, blogs, recipes and similar, all of which usually fulfill the basic assumption that there is more content than what fits on screen. Top of my head I can’t actually remember having recently visited a site that had all there is on a single screen.
> on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar.
I very much disagree. On all of the mobile devices I've used it has never been clear that scrolling is a thing unless there's a scrollbar.
I didn't even know you could "pull down" menus or pull up some app status thing until I called support and asked how to close background apps or turn off wifi
With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message").
There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.
> With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message").
Or using a PDA-like UI with miniaturized desktop UI elements, but that style requires a stylus to use which is why the simpler, chunkier smartphone touch UIs became popular in the first place.
Messed up a college entrance exam form once that used a small <textarea> with several lines requiring a response. Thought there was only 2 or 3 questions when the remaining 5 or so were out of view. Without the scroll bar I had no way of knowing I wasn't viewing the entirety of the element. An example of bad form design, but still.
Wouldn't a "submit" button be located at the bottom of the form?
In which case, in order to submit the form you would scroll down until you see the button, and would therefore have scrolled past all the fields?
It sounds like the form itself had a lot of problems. Either there wasn't enough contrast on the fields to know they existed, or the submit button was located above fields that needed to be saved, which is an inexcusable interface design choice. Also one could argue that there should be form validation as well to alert the user of critical unfilled form fields. Then again, we can't rule out simple user error.
I don't know, it just sounds like a lot of stuff was going on here. I doubt a scroll bar on the side of the webpage would be the critical element that solved all of the problems. I have no problem criticizing Apple, but its hard to put the responsibility of the entire internets' usability problems solely onto their shoulders.
The whole editable portion of the form was just a list of questions in a single <textarea> (you'd give your response under each one). Below the <textarea> was a submit button, so it was unclear that more text was in that element than was immediately shown. Obviously they should have created a proper form with separate inputs for each question.
As a specific example I routinely ran into forms that rendered like this (hidden scrollbars in three different browsers concealing content, though Safari rendered _just_ enough text that it might indicate there was more to see): https://nprescott.com/public/no-scroll-bars.png
In this specific case it is probably obvious enough that hey maybe I need to try scrolling randomly to find "baccalaureate" but the particular form that drove me to capture the above was littered with similar cases where it wasn't at all obvious. More than anything though the invisible scrollbars just meant I had to second guess every single form I ever submitted.
Ok, I haven’t thought of this inline case since I haven’t seen it in a while. But to be honest I’m not sure I would have noticed the scroll bars if those were full width elements. Personally I’d prefer some other visual indicator at the bottom of a cut off element or page.
Phones and tablets have had a extremely negative effect on desktop GUIs. Just an example: AMD's website. I wanted to price and compare some desktop CPUs and their site is just atrocious. Huge, pretty spreads with zero information on them that you must scroll past. Twelve different marketing takes, each a huge chip that begs to distract...please click ME...on something or other irrelevant...and finally...finally at the bottom, a cartoonish over-sized table with a massive font.
Strangely enough, a lot of computer hardware websites are really horrible.
Ever gone to motherboard/RAM/etc manufacturer websites? Unmitigated disaster. Is this the same ram stick model? Why are there 3 million variations and no explanation of the distinction between them? How is it that there are 5 different filters and none of them seem to filter for the thing you’re looking for? Why does the marketing page take me to a different sub domain for this one product, but not for the other? On and on.
A modern smartphone has a much higher screen resolution than a typical desktop PC of the 90s. Yet you can't spare the few pixels needed for a scroll indicator, while the page content itself is full of useless whitespace like it often is?
I can dislike overuse of white space and scroll bars at the same time. Also I like my phones to be as small as possible, not the size of a baking tray.
I’m not an Apple user on desktop, but even there I have scroll bars disabled everywhere including the IDE. Why use the space for something I never use.
And btw, I’m not saying it should be like this for everyone. From my perspective this should be configurable. Same as I wish apps and sites would offer a dense mode toggle to reduce white space.
I routinely need to do this using interfaces that aren't driven by a mouse. On my phone, for instance, where despite having inertial scrolling, it's strain inducing to repeatedly flick through pages with large quantities of content.
It makes sense on mobile, it doesn't really make very much sense on desktop. At least there's an option to make them always visible. One of the first things I do when I get on an apple machine. Along with turning off all the autocorrect junk in textedit.
Maybe I don't understand completely what he is referring to, but on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold.
Scrollbars used to be sometimes useful to get a sense of how much content there is. But everyone using infinite scroll broke that, not apple.