> people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.

Yes, it seems like the younger generation is conditioned to a different form of UI "discoverability" than those of us who learned computing in the desktop era. I look for visual indicators, even on touch user interfaces, so I am always missing functionality that is hidden behind a non-visual interaction. "Pull down to refresh" is something I would have probably never found in many applications if it had not been pointed out to me. iOS is especially notorious for hiding features behind odd/innovative UI behaviors such as press-extra-hard or shake.

I almost feel as if "just show me visual indicators of all functionality because I am old-fashioned" needs to be a new accessibility concept or setting.

I am 30 and I find this hidden scrollbar fad (aka try-to-swipe-every-screen) really frustrating, am I already so old that UX designers should build special accessibility settings for me?

Sure, when I see younger people trying some new GUI they basically touch and swipe everything to discover hidden options and functionalities, because someone decided that a flat rectangle looked "cooler" than a button, or that a greyed out textbox looked more "modern" than a standard white one... but isn't this just bad design? what happened with make things as simple as possible, but not simpler and don't make me think?

Or the "shake to undo" in Notes on iOS that is totally undiscoverable. Also, three fingers gestures, 4 key keyboard shortcuts and ton of UI that changes when alt is pressed, Apple OS are actually harder to use than Windows in some respect.

windows generally had better default keyboard shortcuts than macOS, because many multi-key shortcuts could still be done one-handed (e.g., mash 2 keys with thumb), and shortcuts were better grouped somehow. the specifics escape me now, but i still miss the higher efficiency of windows shortcuts (which i haven't used regularly in over 10 years).

Shake to undo applies to all text boxes on iOS. But I don't blame you if you didn't know that, I only knew about it from the iPhone OS 3(?) keynote that introduced it!

Can you turn this off? I am asking because using an iPhone unlocked while cycling is activating this great feature regularly.

Go to Settings, scroll to the very top (beyond what shows as the top when you first open it). There's a search field (this is in a lot of other "list" styled interfaces like contacts as well). Type "undo" into the field. It'll bring up the location in settings to disable "shake to undo".

It's under the Accessibility settings if you want to just browse around for it.

Awesome, thank you very much

I'm gonna be the jerk who says you really shouldn't be using your phone while cycling.

navigation/gps? workout app? whats the difference between a workout app on my iphone compared to a dedicated device (e.g. garmin edge) in terms of safety?

You shouldn't be actively using, interacting with, and providing manual input to your device (be it a phone, garmin edge, or anything else) while cycling. An occasional glance at a navigation app (on a screen that is held by something other than your hand - a clip, stand, etc.) is probably fine - but taking your hand off a handlebar long enough to hold a device, and taking your concentration off your path long enough to interact with it, is asking for trouble.

quite a few assumptions here.

a) the shaking feature turns on even if i don't type anything just by the virtue of the phone being active (shaking can mean 'undo', not just 'undo typing')

b) i have it mounted on a quadlock on my handle bar, no holding whatsoever.

c) i take the risk of asking for trouble while cycling on a cycling path with no other cyclists near me (within, say, 300m). I am not cycling between 2 double decker buses while texting...

I'll grant you a) and b), but not the last one:

take the risk of asking for trouble while cycling on a cycling path with no other cyclists near me (within, say, 300m).

You don't know. If you start looking at your screen and you are moving, you are a danger to others. I don't care what happens to you, but I care that you don't hurt others. And you may.

If there is such a great risk doing that, do you not think that sharing the road with a car would be even riskier?

I.e. if there is no trust i can glance at a screen when i am on a cycling path with nobody around without injuring someone else, how can I be trusted while sharing the road with cars/buses/trams?

Well, I actually learnt about it years ago then forgot it. So, not only its impossible to find, it’s also easy to forget because no visual clues remind it.

I've been thinking about adding this to the app I'm working on, as a sort of UI hint. Just something real subtle at each edge that is scrollable, to signal the user that they can scroll in that direction (maybe a transparent animated chevron or something).

It definitely does feel like something the browser should handle though. Having to work on stuff like that instead of actual functionality is painful, especially for startups that are trying to iterate fast.

It seems like much of the design rules that evolved by experience is being thrown away by designers because they don't think it's looks nice or is clean enough. Interfaces like Windows 95 that are neither too early nor too modern seem to be really excellent at conveying meaningful information to the user.

The Windows 95/98 scroll bars were vastly superior to those in Win10. No matter the size of the window or the scrollable content, you can tell what is the scroll bar and what isn't. On Win 10 it's sometimes ambiguous. Removing the scroll bar when you're not scrolling is the worst design decision.

Apple removed the scrollbar first, because they wanted the screen to look more beautiful and simpler. Instead you may not be able to tell that a page is scrollable, or maybe where you are on a page.

It's the definition of false simplicity.

Everyone followed suit because Apple Keynote events just made everything look so magical, and Mac/iPhone snobs were taken seriously by the dumbed-down press, and now Windows laptops and keyboards are like their previously-less-functional MacBook counterparts.

Hmm, idk, perhaps a midway between removal and hiding would be to collapse it to ~1px so you gain real estate but still see the position in the document?

Windows 95 users often had 640x480 screens. Somehow they managed to get work done while still displaying scrollbars at all times. I think we can manage on our modern, high-resolution displays.

I'm a KDE user, I'd let you set the scrollbar to autohide (complete or partial) and the width of the deployed scrollbar and partially-hidden one too.

I use that from time to time. Some applications and some desktop environments on Linux do that. It's horrible, might as well not have a visible scroll bar at all. I'm fine if they're a little more narrow than the traditional Windows 95 ones, and the color can certainly be improved (maybe translucent Windows task bar / color-adapting Android notification bar), but expanding or hidden scroll bars are both super annoying on desktops.

On mobile I'm fine with hidden ones. Since attempting to scroll down never has an unintended action (I'm sure someone on the Internet can name an exception, but I can't name a single one so it's not the common case) I always just try to scroll and notice when it doesn't go further.

Maybe for desktop, it might be solved by having a free spinning scroll wheel. Then you can flick like on mobile and nearly never need to actually drag the scroll bar. In the rare case that you do, you can still grab the one that appears on demand (like in many mobile apps), and by appearing on demand you have a visual indicator of how much more there is. (The home/end buttons also go a long way, but one doesn't always want to scroll to the end or use the keyboard.) But until we universally have such mice...

There's definitely a few exceptions, though they're mostly minor annoyances or caused by apps that expect you to be permanently online with a good connection.

The most frequent one I've seen on Android is swiping down while (almost) at the top, and the entire view refreshes. This is mostly in the browser, which simply reloads the page after a few seconds (resetting any text fields you may have modified) and in this case the gesture can be cancelled by reversing it. Unfortunately, if the browser or app has been open for a long time (say, I've left a news app open for three days), the view can be quite different once it finishes reloading, and can be impossible to get back to where I was previously.

Lazy-loading content can also cause issues when offline if the placeholders don't update (Materialistic, the app I'm using now, has both these issues).

Occasionally I'll find an app that likes to do annoying bouncy things with the view when overscrolling the bottom of a list, but that's fortunately rare.

Um, we have an alpha channel now on every single computing device display.

You can make a scrollbar that "ghosts" over/under the content.

To make them always visible, search Settings for "Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows" and untick the checkbox.

Peak OSX / MacOS was Snow Leopard. From next version they hid scrollbars, swapped default scroll direction and started a steady move to make it seem everything should be hidden like iOS.

The success of phones and tablets appears to have made the desktop world afraid they were obsolete, so the trend since Snow Leopard and Windows 7 has been to make the desktop more like a phone or tablet. Windows 8 clearly went too far and provoked a revolt, so Microsoft improved things with Windows 10, but I think the Windows 7 UI is still better than Windows 10 in many ways.

I think that captures the why. Perhaps with a hope that a single UI between the two devices might be cheaper...

Windows 8 was a culture shock, but at least was clear in what it wanted to be. Personally I found it (and to a lesser extent the "mostly like a phone" UI of Win 10 and current MacOS) to be a mistake - I want a distinct and appropriate metaphor for a desktop rather than using it like a 27" tablet. People have dozens of apps and windows open, not one or two at a time.

Win 10, for me, is a mess. The whole flat thing went much, much too far, there's dozens of remnants of the Win 7 way of doing it in dialogues, settings, workflow etc. Win 7 is probably the nicest, and most coherent look Windows managed, but for workflow Win 2000 often had the edge! e.g. every version of Windows since 2000 has reduced the power of search, but made it increasingly obvious that it's there.

I am convinced if MS hadn't removed the start button but kept everything else as it was that Windows 8 would have been a success.

It was in the betas which I enjoyed using. But when it was removed it made the entire OS feel unusable to me. Whoever decided Windows Server 2012 should follow suit deserves just as much scorn.

Snow Leopard was also the last version that included Rosetta; after that many old apps became unusable.

My favorite was an issue which plagued Chrome for a while. When you need a scrollbar to jump down a very long page: 1) wiggle the page with two fingers to make the scrollbar appear, 2) switch from two fingers to one finger and grab the scrollbar handle, 3) just kidding, they automatically hid the scrollbar before you had time to grab the handle.

edit: the issue is still there :(

Yep, I've run into this. A helpful shortcut (in no way discoverable) is function+right arrow to instantly scroll to the bottom of a webpage.

I pretty much always use an external mouse on my Mac at work and at home. Plugging in a mouse automatically makes scrollbars always visible on a Mac and I didn't even realize that for a long while

Clearly, those of us who prefer a real mouse are too addled to use anything more sophisticated, so I suppose this, at least, is a +1 in the usability area.

I have usb mouse plugged into this mac and there was no scrollbar.

edit: I have a magic trackpad 2 also. It took when I turned that off and reloaded the page. Well that's annoying that I lose the scollbars with the trackpad.

I just yesterday found that you can scroll a whole iOS scroll area by scrolling a little then holding your finger over the now-visible scroll indicator bar to "grab it" and drag it around.

I've been using iOS since 4.

I thought this was added in iOS 13.

It was: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-13/features/ (under the "Text Editing" section)

In some interfaces (i forget where, maybe linux or the browsers) they try to annoy you by making the scroll bar so skinny it’s hard to select it.

Thanks for posting this, I never thought to check if scrollbars could always be on. This is a big improvement.

On Windows 10 this setting is in

Settings > Ease of Access > Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows > Off

Thanks! Still not always (in Chrome, still need to scroll or hover over the scrollbar to appear).

Does a setting like this exist for iOS?

Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.

"Checking to see if something scrolls" means some form of finger or hand movement.

I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)

> I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide not to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's because scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.

A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.

I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading - and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their place.

I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder. Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.

Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of science).

I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen, you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...

Now you are supposed to put the strip of paper above the line you are reading. It reduce re-reading, gives you context of what’s coming up next.

I frequently highlight text while reading because the lines are too long and I end up loosing where I am when looking for the next line. This is usually only a problem on desktop.

You might check out Beeline Reader. It's awesome for this exact use case.

Are you actually checking every paragraph, section, list, etc? There may be additional content with overflow-y…

(This is a real-world issue: In a write-up, you may want to present detailed data, but don't want to have every user, interested in the details or not, to scroll over several pages of extensive data. So the logical choice is to present a small, illustrative sample and have more in the overflow. The same technique may be used – and has been historically extensively used by the Engelbart community – for outlined text content.)

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

This is the typical narrow minded view that these app designers (not you) have. There are other uses for the scroll bar. For instance, I used to be able to tell how long it would take to read an article by looking at the scroll bar. Now they are gone and to compensate every other article now as an indication of reading time. Which is of course a worse solution, because people's reading speeds differ and it also clutters screen estate, even is a more annoying way.

The well known xkcd[0] about breaking workflows does not only apply to features, but also to UI. Few designers seem to acknowledge that.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Who do you sympathize with in that comic?

Not when your head does that calculation automatically based upon the pattern recognition that it excels at.