Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
Hidden, thin scrollbars are one of the many scourges of modern UI design. I’m glad more and more environments are at least giving users the option of enabling persistent scrollbars again, but more work is needed here to swing that pendulum back.
The problems is they are ugly and difficult to style. No one wants an unbranded, or worse, generic looking user interface.
That has been a solved problem for ages; make them slender&elegant by default but thick&usable when the mouse pointer hovers near them.
It’s funny, but not that long ago, there existed standards for user interfaces. They meant you didn’t have to spend forever figuring out whether some text was a button, link, or just text.
Seems like we’re taking one step forward & two steps back these days..,.
Yes, I face this problem all the time too. They’ve become so narrow as to defeat the point in having them!
It’s not only a problem with scroll bars, but window frames as well I hate having to pixel hunt display elements just to be able to click on them.
If the screen real estate was needed elsewhere, then I’d understand the reason for compromise. But on high resolution screens with 50% being unused whitespace, There’s just no upside to making mouse targets so small. It just makes things much more difficult to grab with no functional justification at all.
Any pixel gained back from those 90’s relics is an opportunity to deliver more precious ad content to our customers!
Know where the value is!
This is a problem of mobile designs leaking onto the classic desktop environments.
On a phone with a vertical screen and only a few inches of width, cutting off scroll bars, and as you mentioned any frames is prudent.
On a 32″ 4K+ monitor with enough space to have two full applications side by side, (or a full IDE with all kinds of widgets and debuggers), there is no need to save those 12 pixels.
What is worse? My Logitech trackball will not horizontally scroll, if their extremely buggy, and occasionally remote execution bug laden, “Options” software is not installed.
sukru,
+1 Agreed.
I never got the hang of a trackball, though given the limited desk space it would make sense for me to use one. Obviously I’ve used a trackpad, but the mouse feels better to me in terms of speed and accuracy.
Alfman,
Mine is less of a choice, but more of my hands getting older, and non-ergonomic input devices are becoming more difficult to use.
I would still use a mouse for gaming, though.
One of the things I picked up working in the tropics of SE Asia was how ignorant most hardware and OS developers can be of the problems associated with navigating interfaces. Scrollbars, Touchscreens, Trackpads, pretty much everything you can think of doesn’t work for some segment of the population, it’s a major reason why Blackberry was so popular in SE Asia, people wanted keyboards and mechanical navigation devices with physical buttons.
At the time I was trying to sell and service high tech metrology devices by showing people in an airconditioned office how easy they were to drive from a laptop or tablet, and then I watched device after device fail to function or be abandoned in the industrial setting due the issues surrounding navigation via touchscreen or trackpad in humid environments. Zones were too small, determination of gestures too poor.
The irony is not lost on me that companies like Apple and Google rely so heavily on factories in these regions to manufacture and assemble devices, yet largely ignore that same populations as consumers.
There’s nothing wrong with generic-looking user interfaces. It’s annoying, confusing and distracting for the users when the gadgets of every program look different, and a waste of developer effort.
Careful, that sounds suspiciously like common sense
We had “peak” UI in the WinAMP times.
Every* Windows application used to come with their own style, and ability to download more skins. At least the cool ones did. And they also offered pretty flashy splash screens (and if your splash screen went away too fast, you made sure to include a sleep(5) in there). And of course everything was set to be “ALWAYS_ON_TOP”.
Let us not forget about the toolbars. Toolbars everywhere. 10 of them in Internet Explorer. Some on the desktop, and since the vertical space is now gone, a few more on the side of the screen in vertical alignment.
Can’t wait to go back to that era. /s
The last few days I had the “pleasure” to use the pdf-viewer from locklizard. (a total piece of shit)
The scrollbars are something like 3-4 pixels wide, while 50% of the screen width is unused…
And of course they ignore the system-settings.