Scrollbars are becoming a problem
Scrollbars are becoming a problem
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...
Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback...
UX design got better and better for many years...but it has definitely been regressing over the past few years, IMO. It's weaponized minimalism at this point. Because it "looks cool, bro".
It's a variant of enshittification.
The overuse of the word enshittification drives me crazy.
Feels like it's always been a buzzword for whatever someone doesn't like right now
Underuse IMO. We’ve grown complacent in so many regards.
Are they wrong for using a word correctly? Or are you wrong for being a removed about it? Hmmm.
It’s Lemmy’s “play stupid games…” variant
What do you mean 'overuse'?
It's just now entering our vernacular.
Yup, and when I used it, I knew someone would removed about that. It's funny how people get hung up on their pet peeve more than they do the more serious underlying issues we're talking about here. It's the same phenomenon politicians and wealthy elites use to keep us fighting each other over trivial culture war bullshit instead of pulling together to improve our material interests.
applying any design language feels wrong. it's pure manipulation -- i remember being forced onto the official twitter app and couldn't believe there wasn't a scroll bar. i felt lost; the timeline felt infinite, swallowing
I would are that the design industry has gotten better about understanding a user’s core motivations, and how design can solve business problems, but it’s gotten worse at classic interaction design / HCI.
The UX industry is FULL of bootcamp people or former graphic designers who never really studied or were passionate about interaction models.
As with engineering, the demand for UX designers is so high that a lot of mediocre talent can easily get a gig.
Those scenarios you paint definitely exist.
In my decades of work experience, I've also seen it play out a few ways. Sometimes the shop creating the software is too cheap to hire a real UX designer, and they make some poor coder do their best with it (and the coder will usually admit they are not good at it and is frustrated with being coerced into it). Sometimes they hire a good UX person, but that person is constantly overridden / micromanaged by some "marketing genius" MBA type with horrible ideas of user behaviors they want to "push" and other behaviors they want to "disincentivize" in the UX.
On a few (rare) projects, I've seen it done correctly where the UX designer is considered a vital part of the team and their input is valued and they do a good job and focus on what users actually want and need.
Some businesses still understand that if your customers are happy, everything else tends to go better for your businesses. But in this era of relentless enshittification, more and more businesses are looking at their customers at naughty children and/or suckers to be exploited. I keep hoping for a massive backlash against this trend. But it feels like it has to get even worse before it will get any better. They have conditioned younger customers to just expect shit products, shit service, and shit subscriptions for everything. UX design has gotten caught up in this sea change, unfortunately.
Lots of people who are designing websites and webapps are just out for the design. Usability went in the background for whatever reason.
But more and more people are getting more aware of user friendly UI and functions for people with disabilities. But yet it's not the highest priority sadly.
for whatever reason
Flashy sleek shit gets invested in.
Outside of business specifically oriented towards people with accessibility issues, the energy just doesn't translate into VC.
Companies who do try to shoehorn it in when products are more mature usually have:
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A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.
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Development inertia where it's seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners
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Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work
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Lack of will to retroactively identify the breadth and scope of changes you even want to make
There is no mystery. It's not going to get you sexy VC money at the beginning, and then it's bizarrely more work than you'd think once your project is sufficiently large.
This. And it doesn't only apply to companies. I have a personal blog with a couple accessibility issues that I haven't bothered to fix because I've built a lot of my CSS around my bad HTML. Part of the issue is that I built my site as a school project for a web design class I was taking, so code quality wasn't great. One day I might redesign it better, but I don't have the energy for now.
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And just straight up broken by idiocy like infinite scroll.
Most fun are the infinite scroll pages with a footer.
links that are only modal floater windows drive me insane too. this isn't anything! make a website!
Hey, it's difficult to figure out how to present large amounts of information in a usable fashion. So let's just NOT EVEN FUCKING BOTHER and just put everything into a gigantically long list instead.
It's not that it's difficult, this method encourages “doomscrolling” because the user doesn't actively decide to go to the next page.
The Nielsen Norman Group observes that “infinite scrolling minimizes interaction costs and increases user engagement.” Infinite scroll keeps users engaged and on the page because the page never ends: there is always something more to see, no wait to see it, and very few interactions.
People with dexterity and hand control challenges have a difficult time with these skinny scroll bars.
I have neither dexterity nor hand control challenges and I still find it incredibly hard to grab those skinny scroll bars.
One additional design "feature" I really despise is auto hiding scroll bars. So then to visually see when I am I have to scroll up and down to bring it back.
And web designers that do that stupid scroll hijacking where scrolling "stops" and then things move around for a bit should be launched into the sun. It's the most anti-UX design I've ever seen. It's literally the same as temporarily causing your mouse cursor to move in the opposite direction of input and then calling it a "design feature".
Imagine if each application on your computer arbitrarily changed up the direction your mouse cursor moves. It's literally the same thing. Computer input should be 100% predictable and reliable. The instant you do that it makes the computer/program/website feel sluggish and inoperative.
That scroll hijacking legit feels like getting stunned in call of duty or something, suddenly your mouse just doesn't want to do what you tell it to.
Just more examples of modern designers creating shit to stay relevant.
I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-2000s, then it all started going to shit.
Back in the day, the guideline was to put useful information and links at the top of the page when it loads, so that people could read the important bits and follow the links they needed without having to scroll down. Then everyone started using the entire space on load for a stock marketing photo or video so you would always need to scroll to see anything useful. Then they added whitespace everywhere so you'd need to scroll more. Then they removed the scrollbars. And sometimes they make scrolling do unpredictable animations instead of scrolling. It has become self-indulgent design instead of functional.
Make America-Online Great Again!
We had good design up until the mid-2000s,
...when people were saying "I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-1980s..."
...when people were saying "I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-1960s..."
...when people were saying "I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-1940s..."
...when people were saying "I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-1920s..."
Rinse, repeat. The past wasn't always better, you were just younger. We just had different design problems in 2005.
Scroll bar hiding/skinny scroll bars are for people who don't use them.
Apple hides them by default because they expect you to use the trackpad/scroll pad(?) on the magic mouse.
But if we show a full-sized scrollbar all the time, we lose all that space that we could have left completely empty otherwise!
Yeah, losing function over form is annoying.
They need that extra space to cram in more ads!
I am sick of modern minimalist UI where functionality is not a priority.
I always prefer win32 applications for this reason.
Heck, I even prefer the ultra-skeuomorphic textured-everything approach of Mountain Lion-era OS X over the current ultra-minimalist approach where everything is either a hairline or a big flat monocolored shape.
It actually makes it harder to parse the UI when a button, a text field, a label, and a random part of the window can look exactly the same. I'd rather take a file manager that tries to look like a 1980s hifi stereo.
Or you know, a reasonable middle ground.
In the early '90s Alan Cooper wrote a book called About Face which unfortunately has dropped off the face of the earth as far as its influence on UI design is concerned. One of its many sensible proscriptions was that UI elements that can be interacted with should be visibly distinct from elements that are just there to display information. As a programmer, it drives me insane to have to use any of the modern apps that have completely abandoned this principle - or to have to deal with designers who have literally mocked me for thinking this is important.
But but.. but… Apple bad!
That shit started with win2k/winme already. That's when the borders of controls were made thinner, icons were made with less contrast and the first flat buttons that only show their border on hover were being used. So it's quite some time already that this is going downhill.
(tbf, I think the flat buttons were mostly intended for toolbars, but still, style won over function)
Form follows function! Not the other way around!
You’re correct.
However, in our capitalist world, form follows profit. 
I love it when scrollbars are like, half an atom wide. Makes it easy to use the website.
I would like my scroll bars back please. Scroll wheel on a mouse is not enough. Neither is a fling gesture on touchpad or screen.
Sorry bro, the modern designers said they were too big.
You can use the scrollwheel on your mouse, though. Have you seen the meme?
https://old.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/df8cd/watching_someone_use_a_computer/
This is literally the fault of the reddit generation of design. Ironically, reddit is one of the worst-designed pieces of shit on the planet.
Oh well.
I feel you, so I have researched this:
For Firefox you can change the width /style of the scrollbar:
(A) In a new tab, type or paste
about:config
in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
(B) In the search box in the page, type or paste
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style
(C) Press the Return or Enter key to find the setting. Click the Edit (pencil) button on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting.
(D) Delete the current 0 value for the default OS style scrollbar. Then input the value 1 (Mac OS X), 2 (GTX), 3 (Android), 4 (Windows 10), or 5 (Windows 11) in the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style box for the scrollbar style you want to change to. For example, enter 4 to change the scrollbar to the default Windows 10 design.
(E) Click the Save button on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting to apply.
Also for the hiding:
Windows: Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows
Mac: System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars
What the fuck is it with apps just making the scrollbar completely hidden until you scroll with the mouse or keyboard? Microsoft seems like the biggest offender with this. It’s so irritating, they’ve got more than enough space to just keep it around all the time, it’s what I’m expecting to find there, hiding it just makes more annoyed each time. It’s not as bad if you’re using a mouse with a scroll wheel, but on a laptop with a trackpad it’s beyond annoying.
I assume it's part of a trend of having as much useless white space as possible, so that they can stuff more ads into it.
For 1080p screens at least, 170% zoom seems to be perfect fit for most content (for websites where 100% zoom is likely designed for lower resolutions) meaning sidebar ads are not even on-screen (IIRC, maybe you'd need to scroll to not see the left one but not sure how to test this).
Though I guess more sites likely don't need as much zoom to fill content, for instance Kbin is full-width at 150%. Itch doesn't have whitespace even at 100% (on the right side, the left side has it due to the left sidebar that is stuck at the top of the page).
I guess they think all trackpads do the two finger scroll now. Not always the case.
It could be that websites are being made unbearable, to pressure users into switching to the site's mobile apps, which are generally spyware. I can't stand looking at homedepot.com on a phone, for example. Even if I don't look at the screen, I can feel the phone warming up in my hand as the crapware javascript on the site drains the phone battery.
I just generally don't browse the web on mobile unless I'm away from home and don't have a computer nearby. Phones are inferior computers.
I call it the "War on Scrollbars" and I think it started when some meme about watching a teacher use a computer got popular. https://old.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/df8cd/watching_someone_use_a_computer/
I absolutely hate how tiny scrollbars have gotten. I hate how clicking in a certain spot cause the scrollbar to move slightly instead of jumping directly to where I click.
These are modern design decisions that I think shitty designers implemented because they need to feel useful. Then, autistic users who want nothing on their screen praise them for it.
It's disgusting and I hope, one day, we can look back on how the 2010s were the worst decade for software design so far.
Then, autistic users who want nothing on their screen praise them for it
What does autism have to do with scrollbars?
Actually dragging the scroll position indicator as in the comic is still cringe though. I fully agree with the usage of clicking to go quickly to where I want to go, but the most useful thing about a scrollbar to me is that I can look at it to know where I am in the page.
That meme has nothing to do with scroll bars though...
I have a broken scroll wheel (which happens every 5-10 years, whenever the lifecycle of my mouse reaches its end), and I feel the pain every freakin time I wanna scroll.
Nowadays with such high-resolution screens I just can't understand why it's needed to make those scrollbars so narrow.
Because the high res screens of the target audience are just 6.5" big.
Yeah seriously. Like I am okay with them auto hiding when the mouse is away, but nowadays, even when you're mousing over them, they're only like 3-4px wide. What kind of a mouse target is that?! Ridiculous.
For a while I was playing video games with a mouse that had a broken scroll wheel. Some games just don't even implement a scroll bar at all... So you have to hold down the arrow keys to go through each item. So infuriating.
So, to tl;dr the article: size does matter
It's not the length of the scrollbar, it's how you use it (and also girth)
I like the way GTK is doing it. You have a thin scrollbar that is overlayed over the content and has no background (so just the knob) but when you get near it with the mouse, the background appears and it becomes double as thick. That way you're not wasting any space but you don't have this issue of it being hard to use either.
Am I the only one who never considered normal scrollbars to be a 'waste of space'?
It's surprising to me how modern designers seem to care about scrollbars, but not all the white space we see on everything else.
Minimalist design really went from "maybe 38 different clickable links isn't the most optimal way to get around this site, we should probably optimize how we use screen space" to "WE MUST GET RID OF USEFUL FEATURES SO WE CAN DISPLAY 5-8 MORE PIXELS OF WHITESPACE" in the span of a decade lol
What I also like about GTK's scrollbars is that the scrollbar only auto hides when the scroll area completely looses focus. As long as the mouse cursor is hovering anywhere in the scrolling region the scrollbar is visible, so you don't have to scroll first to see where the scroll position is.
X buttons are another problem, light grey and fucken 10% opacity on a white background and the target is right in the middle of the intersect.
I can't stand tiny buttons whose clickable area is limited to the graphic itself, just virtually unusable. I'm a mobile app programmer (or used to be, anyway) and whenever I got handed a design like this to implement I would always make the tappable area larger than the graphic itself - and then have to deal with angry designers who insisted that was a violation of their design principles. On more than one occasion, I was ordered by managers to undo the already-implemented larger tappable regions, on the hilarious grounds that implementing them would take too long.
You made them lose money my friend.
They want you to click by mistake to show “engagement”.
Even using pc all day I can't click a scroll bar on the first time!
Customizing the scrollbar on Firefox using CSS is different so many sites don't even bother and keep the default one
Overlay scrollbars. Luckily in gnome and kde plasma you can disable them and get real always visible scrollbars
According to the article they took away the override setting in GTK4 and they aren't bringing it back
Sounds pretty on brand for gnome ngl
Misc. forenote: not sure if true on all systems but on mine, if you right-click on the scroll bar it acts similar to the old scrollbar arrows (in my file manager it's slower, but moving the mouse speeds it up)
My eyesight is not the best (and my screen isn't that big), but I still don't mind it (for example Firefox). I like that it doesn't seem to change content width (even expanded, it's still in the margins with my higher zoom level). Though I could see using a brighter scroll bar, particularly as it gets smaller (also, a darker scrollbar background to increase contrast). Color might help for readability too.
Back when I used Chrome I didn't like the white scrollbar background and light-gray bar that was horrible contrast yet too bright (and in the corner of my eye it didn't register properly due to that). At one point I used an extension to fix that with a thinner-but-high-contrast bar.
Then again, I also made my own ultra-compact window theme for XFCE (well, XFWM). Frameless and the titlebar is 12px tall but the window buttons are only 8px tall... some of the buttons are slightly wider to compensate (minimize and maximize are widest at 20px), though I would ideally like to allow them to be wider with a wider window (with the current setup, a long-titled window will be made shorter if the buttons take up too much space on a small window).
There is some utility for this as well, as I can have a small music player on-screen or even rolled up and it doesn't block much on the screen. Though I admit it's diminishing returns, specifically without making my own WM which I am unlikely to do.
Seems like I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but I'm all about that out of sight, out of mind vibe when it comes to things that aren't used often.
nevertheless it would not hurt to have at least some options on how to display the scrollbars (if at all)
options
There's the keyword. There should be easy to navigate settings for this.
The problem with modern designers and developers is that they push the narrative that there is "one" way to do things so they don't have to maintain different configurations.
It's lazy. It's incompetent. It's what makes them more money for doing less work.
The solution is to have higher standards. Don't let these fools tell you what you want just so their jobs are easier.
The text boxes full of text, with both a horizontal and vertical scroll bar, on a page with a scroll bar. When I use the mouse wheel near the bottom of the text it scrolls right, towards the right it scrolls down, but I actually wanted to scroll the page down.
I'll see ones that seem to show up visually but I've never ever been able to click onto it and move it.
I bought a macropad with knobs just because of this... (I use a Wacom tablet in place of a mouse and it doesn't have a worthy scrollwheel alternative, so I couldn't navigate many "modern" websites and programs)
I've never even used them. I just scrolled with a mouse or the touchpad gesture, and its much more convenient.
Not me installing a css snippet in Obsidian to solve this exact problem.
The steam scroll bar is so tiny that i thought it was a reflexion on the screen.
Does anyone know what text editor that is in the screenshot? Looks like vscode but less bloaty? I'm interested.
It is Sublime Text!
I personally love it, but IntelliSense made me switch some time ago. The free version asks you to get a license every 50 or so saves, just saying that in case it bothers someone. Other than that, it's a pretty great text editor, definitely much faster (and less bloated) than VSCode.
Wait, you guys don't use your mouse wheel or keyboard to scroll?
To get from the top of a REALLY long page 3/4 of the way down instantly? No. Did you read the article?
Many mouse wheels act as a button as well. Hold the button down while moving the cursor up or down to scroll effortlessly. The further the distance you move the cursor, the faster it scrolls.
I love to use Home and End to jump within a webpage but so many webpages hijack those keys or don't know what to do with them it's depressing
I'm lucky I haven't seen one of these yet
Yeah, why click or tap once in one spot when you can swipe 10 times.
I think the 'gestures' crowd needs to go pound sand.
Either implement it as a setting, or don't force people to use it.
You can make your own with css if you want. I noticed this guy can write a whole blog post about it but he didn't bother to do that on his own site lol.
How disconnected from reality are you where writing your own with css is the appropriate solution?
Have you talked to a normal person recently?
I thought I was in a technology forum opps. I'll explain. Sorry.
My comment didn't mean for everyone to write their own css. I mean the site owner or product designer making these systems needs to add them with css. Because it's their responsibility.
The browser bars are meant to fade away so they don't conflict with the design of the site or app you use. The creators on those apps need to make bigger bars if their users need that.
Eh, scrollbars are one of my least favourite UX design choices, though I respect that some people like them and do think that they should be a reasonable size for those who do want them.
There are so many better ways to navigate vertically scaling content now (not least of which, mousewheels). I think they served a good purpose in the early days of document editors and web browsers, but they're a bit of an easy out for poorly laid out content.
It's so much easier to just drag a scrollbar than use the mouse wheel to go past 1000s of lines - especially if you know how far down the bit you want is!
That is absolutely correct. Anyone who's done office work or computer work with huge documents knows the true value of the classic scrollbar.
It is superior to the scroll wheel because it gives more powerful control over the same function, but since it is slightly harder to use than the wheel, the lazy users avoid it for mundane tasks.
Doesn't bother me. I've been using scroll wheels on desktops and the two finger swipe on laptop track pads for so long that it has to have been at least 20 years since I've last used a scroll bar. They could disappear entirely and I wouldn't even notice.
I use it as a progress bar sometimes: want to know how far down the page I am.
Didn't really bother me till I got bit by a dog and it fucked up my pointer finger.