You don't even have to be elderly.
The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears.
How did that conversation go?
Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go?
Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
Back on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well.
To add two more points to this. I think there's one thing platforms in general got very right: simple touch controls. My one year old is discovering that sliding fingers across a screen, touching and pinching (the three basics) does stuff. Hidden menus, press-and-hold, and so on is secondary. Second, icons are something which is wrong. You need to guess their initial meaning, and translate badly in conversations, like recently with my mom: "press the rectangle with four arrows pointing out of it" (fullscreen or whatever it was).
"Here's an image, guess what is supposed to happen when you click it, also i will give you no info on hover over -- you must push me and then try to guess what i did!" (btw if there's a bug or a configuration state in the app that you or i am unaware of -- you might've pushed me at the wrong time and i might've let you do that)
The Apple II was the first computer that was widespread enough for people to have seen that had a floppy disk. It came out in 1977. Apple dropped the floppy disk in 1998 (21 years later), so it's been 22 years since it was standard in Macs.
Even allowing for some switching time, it has meant "save" for longer than it was a common physical object.
But if i really have to come up with something, I'd say green arrow pointing up. Meaning 'upload to your (own private) cloud'
Windows 10 introduced the navigation bar, which is essentially a vertical version of the Windows Phone application bar, just using a "three lines" icon as the "show labels" button instead of an ellipsis. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls... The start menu and inbox mail app use this control, for example.
This is one reason why UI patents are not a good idea. When different platforms are forced to adopt differing UI patterns because they can't do what their competitors are doing, you get the current mess.
Accessibility can help normal people in extraordinary situations too.
With examples given like curb cuts for wheelchairs helping everyone, and OXO brand kitchen utensils meant for impaired hands just being better for everyone.
Better is better.
Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it.
I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it.
Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:
1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.
2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).
For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things.
---
Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.
I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:
(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)
As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].
Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.
--
[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.
But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it.
But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.
It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.
But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.
(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)
Or, your software is niche and its alternatives have such terrible UI that trying to do what the user expects is adding 3x clicks and actively hurting their productivity.
There can be legitimate cases for learning curve, especially if unlearning is involved. If so, the fact that your designer wants the user to learn is a very welcome position. If they make learning effortless and intuitive, you may end up with a solid piece of software.
This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place
Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.
Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.
Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.
As @strogonoff pointed out elsewhere, there exist domains and niches where a complex and different UI is warranted. Scientific and creative software, for instance, falls into this category. Most software I use does not. I just want to change my account settings, or search for something without feeling lost. Personally, I'd like to see innovation in UX beyond hiding stuff, moving it around, or making it look a certain way. Whenever I see that some app I use has "revolutionized" their UI, the changes usually make me think of this:
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
That's a pretty good rant. Very Donald Norman. Know that I mostly hate rants about UI, ergonomics, design.
The follow up is pretty good too.
I've long had some notions about incorporating haptic and tactile stuff (I'm not saying "feedback") into the communication channels. Alas, I've never had the gumption to execute.
One very old notion was adding physical feedback into the mouse. A clicker/knocker, so the mouse would feel like it was passing over a bump. And one of those whirly things to make the mouse buzz.
Someone's actually done the physical part. But I don't think anyone has integrated it into the UI/UX.
Certainly nothing as sophisticated as Apple's trackpad.
Any way. Thanks for sharing.
One of the common responses I see when I complain about a bad UI is someone saying "no it's easy you just do ____". It's frustrating because that's not the point - the point is that I had to do research to find the answer!
There are cases, especially with specialized tools for complex tasks, where you are expected to spend time learning how to use the tool effectively. Photoshop is a great example. Vim is a great example. Figuring out stupid stuff like whether that grayish light blue vs dark gray fill on the checkbox means "enabled" or "disabled" is not an example.
Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.
Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.
Bonus points: turn the monitor to portrait mode and do it sideways.
That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.
Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.
Some VCR’s had a timed recording setting. More commonly, and you see this on cars before they got touchscreens, there were settings and options that you had to navigate to by hitting a specific sequence of buttons to get to the appropriate menu.
The core loop was generally fine. It was when you needed anything else that suddenly you needed the manual.
[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19830424&id=...
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
The other hidden complexity was reception and tuning - so many people had problems getting the antenna pass-through working, and then getting the VCR picture to display on a TV channel (no switchable inputs in those days).
Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!
Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.
I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when
1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and
2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.
This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.
Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.
So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.
I type the konami code as soon as I discover a web app supports keyboard input. I have no problem pulling-to-reveal and shaking to undo. In fact, it makes me feel awesome to know all this little secrets and have people all like: Wait! how did you do that?
But when I design software I don't do it for people like me. I want my users to feel awesome and delighted without being UI spelunkers. Good design doesn't make you think.
It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working.
Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.
Side note, I've always suspected it's an issue of too many cooks in the kitchen. They spend tons on UX but end up with something barely usable.
WHAT?!
I use it all the time. I work off-shift so most of the messages I receive were sent quite a while ago, and pending when I wake up and grab my device. Knowing when they were sent is a very important bit of context.
It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store.
FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.)
That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.
So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I would just sometimes be working and suddenly everything is gone and I had no idea why.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
- discover which registry key
- discover how to craft shit in a game
- to find where my Android setting is and what the searchterm/keyword for it is.
Without google/duckduckgo 80% of the options in my world would be undiscoverable or take waaaay too much time to figure out.
If you're refering to Minecraft, one of the reasons why Minecraft blew up that much was that it was around at the exact right time in history: when online gaming had become viable and let's-plays were just becoming a thing. Minecraft, as originally intended, is a communal experience where you learn from the friends you're playing with and from sources on the internet. If I had to describe Minecraft in one sentence, it would be "let me show you that cool thing I saw Pewdiepie do last week". The idea has become commonplace in video gaming at this point, but back then it was fairly new.
(That said, opaque game experiences have been successful before, like the original Legend of Zelda. I guess the schoolyard served a similar purpose back then.)
But I agree that it's a bad feature, and IMO it's a rare miss from the Windows UI team who if nothing else have developed excellent window management.
Anyhow, I just tried shaking a window from my work laptop and discovered that this behaviour activates on the second change of the direction in rapid succession.
While I was experimenting, I also discovered that shaking the window again restores the other windows so you don't have to restore them individually if/when this happens accidentally.
I don't think anybody needs that "quick" way to do that, and that nobody needs to change the icon sizes often. I have no idea if that misfeature could be blocked.
It’s insanity.
It's akin to shaking my head before focusing on a specific task. I shake the task window and the other applications that I still want open but won't be using for a bit all hide away.
Shake the window again, and they will all come back.
This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since.
I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?
Thank you very much :)
Somehow my 1 year old son can invoke it repeatably every time he gets his grubby little hands on my phone...
Settings | Home Screen & Dock | Multitasking | Allow Multiple Apps
No idea if the same setting exists on iPhone or if it disabled split screen through.
The whole feature is so badly designed on iPad. I was forever detaching a Safari page and ending up with two Safari apps. So tapping the Safari icon wouldn't take me back, it only takes you to the detached page, and you think you have "lost" all the other pages. You need to close the detached page (none of that would be obvious to a novice). Also getting a page to detach into a popup by mistake, and then not being able to get rid of it (I still don't know the correct swiping motions!)
So if you accidentally hold the press for a fraction too long you block that number.
And then you wonder why your friend(s) don't love you anymore...
To unblock it, you have to go to the Contacts and dig through options there, the SMS app showed nothing of help. It wasn't obvious that you had it blocked!
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
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Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. [1]
If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother?
This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.
* It's the experienced users who were were less likely to recognize the "burger menu" or the three dots (does that have a catchy name) as something potentially useful. They didn't look like "real" controls. It was the less experienced users who just naturally tried clicking on anything near the top that looked interesting, or waving the cursor around looking for hovertext on active components.
* Confronted with a landing page that seems to have nothing more than some splashy graphics and a few words - notably no scrollbars - experienced users are likely to wonder if the page is broken for them (because that was a very common experience at the height of the browser wars and still persists). Less experienced users who grew up with smartphones are more likely to start swiping right away.
A user who was older but not experienced with computers would align more closely with the young 'uns on most of this. When everything's completely new you just start experimenting. It's when you think you know things work but they don't work that way any more that things start to get frustrating.
Hell yes. In most instances, I'm way beyond this point at only 30 years old. Come to think of it, it actually makes me wonder how I will feel about UIs at 50 or 60 years old.
Dear Google developers: if you decide to randomly delete a somewhat irrelevant word from a search query and you're left with "ten minute", it's far more likely that a person wants a ten minute timer than that they want to search your database of videos for ten minutes. Also, why do you search youtube instead of the web? Are you doing this specifically to irritate the hell out of me?
Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.
When the older folks in my life tell me exactly that I take their word for it. They usually they no issue being brutally honest about other aspects of life.
A designer. Probably the same person who wanted to turn links from blue-and-underlined to same uniform gray with zero indication
I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.
It's a leftover from when iPhone screens where much smaller: https://postimg.cc/WFdqPwfd
Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)
I'm know my tech and I can't figure out how to reliably get Safari on IOS to display the bar at the bottom.
Makes me crazy
- swipe down from anywhere in the vague middle of the page?
- swipe down on the right hand edge where an "invisble until you need it" scrollbar might be lurking?
- swipe down at the "not quite the top/bottom edge of the screen" because you don't want the OS swipe, you want the app swipe.
Aarrrgh! I don't even have an iPhone and the options drive me crazy.
On Chrome I could't get the button to appear so I can save the PDF on my drive. Completely frustrating.
I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or panel around just to figure out the boundaries.
One of the things I thought was brilliant about early Windows 8-era "metro" design: it was the only era Windows briefly experimented with going scrollbar free (it went back to scrollbar "light" soon after) and when they did so they absolutely made sure that the application grids never lined up with viewport. If there was something to scroll, it would stick out a bit, always that little hint that there was something more further down or right.
It got some flak, especially from macOS design fans, for not being "clean enough", but you'd have apps with no visible scrollbar and you knew whether or not there was anything to scroll just looking at them. You didn't have to squiggle your finger around (or fiddle with the scroll wheel) to check.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
"Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage."
What's most telling is how even Apple often does an astonishingly bad job at it - it really sets the precedent regarding diminished importance.
As an exercise: Browse the App Store for a while and count the number of different ways it implements "go back one step".
I changed the setting to Mac OS always shows scroll bars, but I have no idea how someone thought hiding them was a good idea.
The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you!
Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
I works a surprising amount of the time!
I can't live without firefox's reader mode, which is pretty much Gopher-for-html.
And for Nuke Overdrive mode, add a check for position: sticky, i.e.
(function () {
var elpos,i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
elpos = getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;
if (elpos === 'fixed' || elpos === 'sticky') {
elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);
}
}
}
)(); (function () {
for (const node of document.querySelectorAll('body *')) {
if (['fixed', 'sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)) {
node.style.display = 'none'
// node.remove()
}
}
})()
Regarding tree mutation - I have to admit, it gives me some petty satisfaction looking at the errors thinking "Where is your sticky NOW!"
I've considered writing an extension to kill them all by default, but I'm afraid I'll break some site in a way that really confuses me and end up wasting more time figuring out what happened than I save with the extension.
I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability.
Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display is off, long press is Siri.)
My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar at the top and realized it was probably a drag handle. Grabbed that and tried to flick it downwards. No luck, but it moved in a way that made it seem like dragging down more would do it, but nope of course that wasn't it either. How about a flick to the right? Nope. Dragging it to the right? Agh! It's trying to dock into split screen mode! I dragged it around some more hoping for different behavior before dropping it back into place and again trying a flick to the right using the handle at the top. And that FINALLY did it. Apparently I didn't put enough enthusiasm into the first flick I tried... What a pain in the ass.
I don't like how sensitive to speed some of the actions are. I have similar issues with bringing up the dock. I usually end up going to the home screen instead.
I keep meaning to look for a good iPad tutorial, to see how to do all this stuff.
(Admittedly, there were less features, then…)
You set the phone next to the terminal and the card comes up when radio contact is made.
I don't think there is way to make it discoverable without a big sign saying tap here ↓. Not from the phone anyway. Just something children will see and in the future never think twice about.
My computer is an 11-inch MacBook Air.
That means that even if I run Safari full-screen, which is inconvenient, I have only 680 vertical pixels for content.
It's amazing how many web sites I run into that throw up fixed-position pop-ups that are bigger than that, and I can't close them or scroll to see their content because the designers or middle managers decided that every person on the planet is rocking a 27-inch 5K display.
Usually I just close the window and never visit the site again. If it's important, I break out the dev tools and start invoking display:none until I hit the right element.
https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...
I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen.
It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!
No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)
Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability?
Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop some kind of swipe tic where they instinctively try to scroll around on every screen that opens. Would be a pretty sad testimony to this UI concept.
Because some things are scrollable and it’s usually fairly obvious if there’s going to be more content.
If it’s not clear to you, I totally get why you think that.
But I don’t suffer the same issue.
Why should I have to have scrolbars plastered all over the show to tell me that something is scrollable when I can check it myself in less than a second?
I understand why people disagree - why is it so hard for you to understand that I disagree?
Generally it feels like the pro scroll bar opinion is actually quite aggressive, needlessly so.
There are subtler themes for scrollbars as well so that they don't have to stand out.
I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.
There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.
Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.
The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small.
You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.
Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline of work so it is very hard for me to imagine otherwise)
We used to achieve this balance with a manual.
A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.
Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.
So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things.
I open a window, and decide I need to resize it.
There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it.
I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this.
I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.
Don't blame Xfce for that but Ubuntu. For some reason they decided to make the resize area 1 pixel wide. It's specific to recent versions of Ubuntu. It worked fine on LTS 16 (or was it 14?) and on Debian.
- select non-maxmised open window
- keyboard shortcut Alt+Space. Then M. to move.
- use arrow keys to move windows offscreen, say to the right. Don't touch the mouse!
- Hit Enter key to confirm position.
From now on. Anything but "full maximise from the taskbar" makes the window "disappear" without a trace. "Restore" from the taskbar doesn't help.
And assuming you even know exactly happened, you still have to guess which direction they took the window and how far...
How is it there is no "Position Reset to 0,0" option?
- From the keyboard WIN+{Left|Right} resizes and pins the window to the side of the screen
- From the keyboard WIN+Up to maximize the window (or right click on the task bar and select maximize. Now, drag the title bar from the top and the window will unpin from the screen and move with the mouse
- Right click on the task bar and choose any of the windows arrangement options (Stack, tile, cascade)At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling.
Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation.
(Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.)
What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps.
As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't.
IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious?
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look?
Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.
Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT
You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern OS+apps on one.
(That's honestly for the best; text and icons in modern OSes are both a lot more legible due to the increased fidelity and breathing room they have. But display resolutions have to keep up; and, at least for low-end PCs, they aren't.)
When done right, increasing screen density doesn't really affect available space, just makes everything sharper (unless you manually reconfigure it to get more space, like I do on my hidpi laptop).
UI elements are still far smaller than comparable ones in Windows 10 or macOS, when those are running at 1080p unscaled. On XP, IE and Explorer both manage to fit four toolbars (rather, a title bar + three toolbars) in 105px of vertical space. On my own macOS Catalina install, Chrome manages to fit only two toolbars in 86 device-independent pixels of vertical space.
Likewise, just consider the fact that people weren't generally looking at PDFs back in the XP era, but rather plaintext, which—as rendered on this image—was exactly 8px tall. A lot of 8px-tall text fits on a 1080p display, no matter how many toolbars you have; and a lot of 8px-tall text will even fit on a 640x480 display, if you make efficient use of the vertical space. But because PDFs use vector fonts, not bitmap fonts, they will look unreadably muddy if you attempt to scale one down such that the text only uses 8px of vertical height. You need more vertical space to look at PDFs.
So, in combination, when you throw a Windows 10, running Google Chrome, displaying a PDF, on a 768p display, it's just an ugly constrained problem.
Given that most scrollbars are vertical however, it isn't a big deal. I've gotten more vertical space from putting my taskbar on the left (when 16:9 became ubiquitous) than anything other change.
And because their designs make windowed use problematic (both because of the title bar issues, and because space is used poorly in the name of "clean design"), they encourage even full screen use.
Add to that the fact that more than a few applications default to full screen at first run, and ...
This is why we can't have nice things.
IntelliJ IDEA also fell victim to this trend of abusing the title bar, but they are be reverting the change and providing a setting after listening to the inevitable criticism: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-219212
Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing hand. You have to learn that, but there's a clear visual difference in the cursor to show that something differnt happens there.
What are some examples of the two approaches?
[1] http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convert-to-popup/i...
[3] https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars # chromium, firefox has another rule:
html {
scrollbar-width: none
}So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.
I'm not talking about shitty old laptops. I'm talking about shitty new laptops. There are laptops you can go into an electronics store and buy right now that have 1366x768 displays. And that's ridiculous.
Yes, these laptops are cheaper. But putting a 1080p panel in these laptops wouldn't be that much more expensive. Maybe an extra $0.50 on BOM, compared to the current design. Or, in fact, it might have exactly the same upstream cost. Why, then, use the shittier panel?
The 1366x768 display is purely there for market segmentation. It's an artificial constraint hardware makers impose on their low-spec devices, in order to make them unattractive to people with higher budgets.
A lot of these low-spec devices would be just fine for the small amounts of work many people have to do on computers, and so these people would buy them if they only needed "a little bit of" computer, even if they could afford something more expensive. (Just like you buy a $50 blender, not a $500 blender, if you're only making piña coladas.)
But the people who would consider these low-spec devices (despite having the budget for higher-spec devices as well), are pushed away from the low end, by these artificially-imposed pain points.
And that means that the people who do only have the budget for a low-spec laptop, are getting an artificially-imposed screwing, getting a shittier laptop than their money would buy them in an efficient market, purely because the supplier went to extra design effort to make their low-end products actively repel middle-end customers.
And taken in that lens, the fact that modern OSes don't work well on 1366x768 displays is actually kind of the point. It's not something the OS manufacturer can fix on their end. Because this would be a vicious cycle: if the OS began to work just fine on a 1366x768 display, then the laptop mfgrs would design their next series of low-end laptops to have even smaller displays, in order to re-introduce the market-segmenting "cramped feeling."
That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.
1. there's a potentially-huge result set;
2. almost nobody ever wants to see the whole result set, but rather almost always just wants to see the first N chunks, and then drops off;
3. the results are sourced from a data lake, or from eventually-consistent geographic shards, or any other process where you need to actively gather results together with a map-reduce.
When these three factors apply, it becomes very expensive to know exactly how many results you will have, because that changes your partial streaming map-reduce workload into a complete map-reduce workload, over potentially billions of records, just to validate their inclusion and then count them.
Think "Twitter timeline." If every client displaying a Twitter timeline needed to know in advance how many tweets they could ever see, total, if they "scrolled all the way back" — then Twitter's servers would fall over from the load of calculating that number.
Another example is Google Search, which, while not "infinite scroll" on the client, is still a "map-reduced stream" on the backend. Google has put some extra effort into heuristic scheduling logic for its Search map-reduce: it grabs an initial 20-page-or-so chunk of the stream and caches it on a sticky-session node for you. This means that, if your search-result set is less than 20 pages, you get to know the actual result-set size. If it's more than 20 pages, though, Google Search reverts to exactly the same "you'll only know when you're at the end when you get there" semantics of SQL cursors. You see the first 20 pages, with a "next" arrow to go beyond them; and then it just starts counting up, and up, and up...
I'm glad I work in infra, not apps. Infra developers certainly make their own share of dumb decisions, but they're not that lazy and sloppy and user-blaming.
If you know you have one more result, that is necessarily because your data pipeline actually has that result available for it to count; i.e. the result record/tuple has been loaded into the database’s memory, and the database has determined that that record/tuple is valid and fresh. (And at that point, rather than counting, the DB may as well send you that record itself. Just counting it has already required almost all of the same work!)
Remember that MVCC exists. You can’t know how much of something you have as of a given instant without doing version deduplication/application of tombstone records. This is the reason that COUNT() in Postgres takes minutes/hours on large (>1bn records) partitioned tables: you have to actually visit records, to see whether they’re still part of the current MVCC transaction-version, and therefore whether they should be contributors to the current count.
That applies whether or not you’re “counting” or actually streaming results. Given the architecture of both traditional data-warehouses — and of the map-reduce systems like Hadoop that are used to do reporting on data-lake data — you can’t know whether anything that’s in the rest of the data set is going to actually exist when you get to it. Your data warehouse might have a 100GB heap of data in a table, but everything after the first 1GB of it is dead tuples, such that after you’ve streamed the first 1GB of results, the rest of the streaming consists of the data warehouse sitting there silently for a minute or two (as it checks the liveness of those tuples) before saying “okay, nothing more, we’re done.”
And because of this, it’s not about precision. You can’t even guess. You can’t know whether you have one more result, or a billion more. Until you actually check them.
Yes, OLAP systems are different. OLAP systems operate in terms of infrequent batch inserts, giving the system time to build indices, generate counts, etc. in-between, that will all stay valid up until the time of the next batch insert. An index is, in a sense, a pre-baked answer of the “set of live tuple-versions” that a data-warehouse is holding. Count the table? Just return the size of the index. If you’ve only ever built OLAP-oriented systems, maybe it feels like these are the “simple, obvious” solutions to this problem.
But none of the things we’re talking about — global-web search engines, social-network timelines, marketplace listings — are OLAP systems. They’re OLTP. They constantly get new results in, and people expect to be able to see freshly-inserted data in the results as soon as they insert it. Data comes in at too high a rate to generate “dataset snapshots” ala ElasticSearch. The pipeline has to deal with data as it comes, doing as little to it as possible so that it can ingest it all at the ridiculous rates required, by pushing all the work of validating tuple liveness/freshness off to query-time.
And given that, OLAP properties don’t attain in such systems. It’s basically the CAP theorem at work: Consistency (and cross-shard index-building) both require time for the system to investigate itself; and you can’t get Availability (and/or cross-shard freshness) unless you run the system too fast to allow for that time.
"Apps" to folks in storage (like myself), networking, OS, etc.
Even you? Wow!
But srsly, that's not a snide comment but rather a hint that your personal sensibility may not reflect broad sensibilities. And of course, there may not even be a single broad sensibility -- look at the political parties in the US, both the major divisions and the subdivisions within each. Sometimes, the maker of something has to make a design choice consistent with their [market success proven] direction.
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed.
When I'm on my laptop, I do. Every inch of vertical space is precious. On my display monitor, not so much, but having the buttons reveal rather than permanent doesn't detract in the slightest.
Then I opened Adobe After Effects for the first time and it suddenly made sense to me, the UI I found intuitive was just years of practice. How is an x in a corner a close button? What's so intuitive about swiping up to see a menu?
It's to stop the offset shift. Pages with scrollbars and pages without have different document widths but the same viewport width.
When you click between the two, the page "shifts" half a scrollbar width if it's centered.
To fix this, Apple made the scrollbar an overlay. That stops the shifting. But then everything on any page with a scrollbar looks off-center.
To fix that, Apple made it disappear when it's not being used.
For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when that "feature" came out.
I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Those are real and important functions I desire. What I actually need is for news and blog sites to stop covering 1/4 of their vertical window space with hovering frames, ads, and banners asking me to subscribe. Which, by the way, subsequently don't properly calculate into that now hidden scroll bar's movement and cause you to overshoot the displayable area when paging down. End rant.