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0 pointsIAmBroom2mo ago0 comments

Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better.

Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.

Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.

I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.

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whynotmaybe2mo ago

> scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns

Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool".

/* rant /

Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section.

And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section.

And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section.

1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar.

And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar.

I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti.

/ end of rant */

efreak2mo ago

I've seen it mentioned somewhere, probably here on HN, that the original thin scrollbar was implemented in Gnome, and that it only applied until you moved your cursor to it. If true, this sounds like a great innovation. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to expand the scrollbar when you get near it. And of course, scrollbars also didn't start to disappear until long after the square-ish monitors that made them so annoying were mostly replaced by widescreen monitors that didn't have that issue.

Anecdotally, I do recall using an extremely obnoxious viewer application (PDFs or ebooks or some such) on the Windows 8 store that reversed scroll entirely. The scrollbars were still there (though I can't remember if they had handles), but scrolling the mouse wheel down moved the document up.

The best UI is no UI--the program anticipates what you need and does it when you need it. Unfortunately, this is impossible in practice for anything other than the simplest systems (eg. pause music playback when the phone rings).

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