 Here's my pitch You know how some websites have a little progress bar highlight across the top of the page to show how much of the page you've read? Imagine a similar tool that shows you how much of the page is in view and how much remains, but persistently visible on every window on your computer, along the right side, integrated into a user interface tool that's wide enough that you can click on it, and not a moving target that disappears sometimes I call it the "scroll bar" 106 comments
 @researchfairy Maybe it could also indicate how much of the page is currently visible by changing it's height proportionally? I mean, it would get some getting used to, but would helpfully tell you proportionally how much of the page you are seeing. @researchfairy And please make them wide enough to be usable with a mouse (click-dragging the slider, less interested in the up/down buttons). While we are at it, define a minimum height for the slider so it stays somewhat useful if there's a lot of data to scroll through. 😍  @researchfairy When implemented right the article progress bar is a bit different to a scroll bar, because it tracks only the article text box (ie the main content). There's usually a lot more on any given article page (yes, ads but also headers footers etc).  @kolya @researchfairy I think you mean when you implement them wrong. (/s) When implemented right, they tell you where you are on the page. People don't give a care in the world where they are in the article. They care about knowing where they are in the page, so if they get interrupted, they can quickly get back to where they were before. That's the whole point.  @researchfairy Man, I completely forgot about this like... "gummy candy" era of shiny buttons. Also wild to see the pre-OSX window buttons. What a trip down memory lane   @sidereal @researchfairy I *think* that version of IE launched a few months after Aqua had been shown (but before OS X had actually launched), and the MS team was given an NDA’d head start so they could theme it like pseudo-Aqua like that.  @researchfairy Btw, you can enable permanent scrollbars again in Firefox: It’s an option in the general section at the bottom of the settings page. IMHO a must for Mastodon Web usage. Edit: To be specific: I was naturally talking about Firefox on Linux. :P @frumble @researchfairy also if you're on Windows 11 you need to instead go to Settings > Accessibility > Visual effects and turn on Always show scrollbars because Firefox follows the system default.   @frumble @researchfairy (in case nobody else has already said) there’s also a MacOS-wide setting in the settings somewhere for it. But I also lament that it defaults to being invisible rando scrollbars these days. @researchfairy you know you can switch the Mac OS scrollbar behaviour to be always visible, right?  @researchfairy @harshad sometime in the late 2000s UI design started to get really, really wrong  @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad @Revertron @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad You think design isn’t a real job? 🤣🤣 . Apple is the most valuable company on earth with a current market cap of $3.030 Trillion. This is primarily due to their prioritisation and investment in product design. As Steve Jobs once said “Design is not just how it looks and feels like, design is how it works.”  @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad I blame Jon Ive and Steve Jobs for favouring overly minimalist design. I like the idea of buying a computer that isn’t covered with stickers, but hiding the UI in a mysterious way is user hostile. @MichaelPorter @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad Steve Jobs loved the #skeuomorphic GUI. It was Windows which started flat design and Jon Ive taking over the software design at Apple changed everything from beautiful to designless boring flat. @MetalSnake @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad Yup, and Scott Forstall let that light shine brightly while he was in charge of iOS… But Steve was a big fan of Ive and ultimately had say over the direction that Ive took the look of the Mac and its OS. Disclaimer—I’m not an Apple historian, just grumpy. @MichaelPorter @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad The timeline is like this: Steve Jobs died. Scott f* up Maps. Tim Cook fired Scott because of it and assigned Ive to GUI design. And we got the ugly mess we have today. @MetalSnake @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad Ah, okay - more than ten years on and I’m already mixing up dates 😊  @thomasfuchs @researchfairy @harshad Touchscreen killed UI. Also, streaming killed fixed media by design, why sell to the plebes when you can rent to them and gouge them in perpetuity? @researchfairy I get it. So you can get a visual representation of how much clickbait you have to scroll through to read the rest of the article. @researchfairy I'm grateful that operating systems and WM/DEs still have scroll bars available. I hate not having them in modern OSes. Thankfully, on most platforms, it's generally painless to enable either through a GUI or the command line. (macOS shown in the screenshots) But the fact that we've lost out on straightforward, functional visualization for poorly thought minimalism as the default is a major step backwards.  @ktnjared @researchfairy In Gnome, you can turn off disappearing scrollbars in the Accessibility control panel. They stay thin, though, and there's no universal way to fix that.  @carcosa @ktnjared @researchfairy fun thing in new GTK releases though is you often have to do that override PER APP now :/ The gnome/gtk team in it's long running war against it's own users is phasing out a lot of global settings and scrollbars is one of the casualties :/   @researchfairy @marioguzman I also miss scroll bars - and I wish Apple would at least make an effort to make them look nice when you choose to show them permanently.  @researchfairy yeaaah... I set that to "always show" and it's surprising how many times it's totally unclear without the bar. With careful design, the disappearing bar can work fine. But that is an *extreme* minority, misleading cutoffs by accident / overly-flexible design (often good! but prevents fine tuning like this needs) are literally everywhere all the time.  @researchfairy One feature my browser will have is absolutely no way for site to hide, inhibit, shrink, or obscure scroll bars. If content doesn't fit, it has a full size accessible scroll bar. @researchfairy And then if we had that, we can make them follow the style rules of the website https://www.spectrum-research.com//V2/projects_scrollbar_generator.asp I was so delighted to discover that Windows lets me switch scrollbars permanently on as an #a11y feature: https://mastodon.cloud/@gimsieke/111451666475877286  @researchfairy At the top of my Christmas list this year is that the Mastodon website, in dark mode, have a *visible* scroll bar. Since I had eye surgery earlier this year, it's the only UI element I can think of that hasn't improved with perfect, corrected vision. "What's the lowest possible contrast we can use? Hey I know, let's choose a grey that's literally just one shade lighter than the background black." :eyeroll: @acm_redfox Yeah I always turn scroll bars on when they're off. Mostly a Windows thing IIRC.... @acm_redfox @croyle AppleTV has a high contrast mode that adds white borders around the selected icon. It’s a huge usability improvement and still looks good. No idea why it isn’t the default. Settings > Accessibility > Display > Focus Style > High Contrast @alextm @acm_redfox Apple tends to favor that low contrast light-grey on white look. Probably Jobs' fault... Thank goodness for having other options available! @croyle @acm_redfox Yeah, fortunately Apple takes accessibility seriously enough that there are always a bunch of options for improving usability. The blame is likely more on Ive than Jobs though. Jobs loved the skeuomorphic look for software (early iOS and elements of MacOSX Aqua). It wasn’t until Ive took over software design that things started going ultra-minimalist. That first year or two of Ive’s software design was a tough adjustment! @alextm @acm_redfox You could be right, although I think Job's love of Mercedes, luxury goods, etc. made him easy to be swayed in that direction. I think Ive was the designed of what Jobs had envisioned. @croyle Yeah, it isn’t exactly clear from the information available. But we do know that Ive only took over software design a couple of years after Jobs passed when the company forced Scott Forstall out. It’s possible they discussed this direction prior to that of course, but Steve’s love for skeuomorphism is well documented, and it’s exactly because of his love for luxury goods as you stated. @alextm I find it an endlessly fascinating subject. I was heavily involved with web design/UI/UCD when I was at IBM and worked with several brilliant UI designers (and PhDs) that I learned a lot from... UI design and problem solving was always very gratifying work. @croyle It definitely is! Sounds like you had an interesting job at IBM. I’ve been fortunate to work with some very talented designers too, but mostly doing physical product design. For a while I had the opportunity to work with a really great external UX team on one of my projects, but the majority of my UI/UX/web work has been self taught. There’s so much to learn! @alextm Very true, it seems almost endless, which is a very mixed blessing. :) I loved learning new things about design and UI from those guys though... I got to experience just a little of physical product design, which had very interesting aspects to it. I'm a little jealous that you got to experience more of it. @croyle Agreed on the blessing/curse. There’s always so much to learn (which I love), but never enough time to learn it all! I’m very grateful for that phase of my career. I was working at Braun/Oral-B in Germany and got to chat with Dieter Rams a few times about various design topics. The rest of the team was ridiculously talented as well. I’ve been trying to find something like that but more focussed on UI/UX since I left, but it feels so rare to find that type of thing! @alextm Indeed. the guy I replaced as webmaster for our big sites at IBM moved on to a really fun job he lucked into, working with a team that envisioned and built a demo of a fully connected/integrated living area and garage. This was 20 years ago. I know they had a blast working on that project. I just got to see the work in progress. @croyle That sounds like a really fun project. One of the things I loved doing at Braun was creating consistent design across a range of mediums, everything from our websites to packaging to the UX and hardware design of the product itself. Working on a large system like connected home would be right up my alley. And I bet it would have been especially interesting at that point in time when most of it hadn’t been imagined at all yet! @alextm Yes, I appreciate the consistency across products and even mediums! That's something I often had to battle with. :) The connected space guys were having a blast on the project and I was a bit jealous. They were envisioning things like connected kitchens and refrigerators before those things really existed, and monitoring/alerts/etc. for all of the many systems on a connected car, etc. I couldn't help but ponder many aspects of it, even though it wasn't my project... @acm_redfox Happy to help! I didn’t discover it until a couple of months ago, it’s such a small change but makes a huge difference :) @researchfairy @siracusa a simplified product line for Apple from that era would be nice too ;-) @researchfairy Personally, I don't mind it much. But at least on macOS you can re-enable them in System Settings → Appearance. @researchfairy After that you’ll ask for buttons that look like they can be clicked. Then dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! @researchfairy That would be a game changer! You could even make it clickable to go page at a time!  @researchfairy You've encouraged me to change my scrollbar appearance a little bit. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-scrollbars + about:config 😉 @researchfairy I don't know... seems like it would take up a lot of screen real estate on everybody's 4K, ultrawide displays.    @researchfairy I just switched back my macOS scrollbar behavior to "always visible" Personally I like that modern scrollbars tend to get out of your way until you hover over them, but your sarcasm is very funny :metaph:  @Metaph it's called adding an "auto hide scrollbar" toggle in the settings. @researchfairy in MacOS using the terminal app type: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always" I know that you know that you can just... turn that on. But i'm gonna type it out loud anyway since none of the other replies are. ( It's in system preferences > appearance, for those who whom are unaware. )   @researchfairy@scholar.social I ran across a form that had a progress bar because it showed only one question at a time. There were only four questions. One was for your first name, another was for your last name.  @researchfairy My computer spends most of its time booted into Haiku, where this is still the default.   @researchfairy AND THAT ARENT ONE FUCKING PIXEL WIDE AND INVISIBLE. /me breaks down in tears @researchfairy @siracusa And than there is one more thing: A frame border distinguishable separated from that scroll bar and that indicates if a window can be resized and that is big enough to grab it with the mouse to do so. @researchfairy dear gnome/gtk team, look at this picture and then please re-think your idea about scrollbars. I'm over 40 and I struggle catching your stupid tiny alibi-bars. @researchfairy That sounds like a really good idea. Could I perhaps directly jump to a certain place with a single middle mouse button click on this scrollbar doodad? @researchfairy I turned on “always show scroll bars” on a family members new computer and they were honestly more thrilled about that than any of the new modern features |
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I miss scroll bars