that’s almost as obvious as the forty seven key combination to print the screen in macos. which changed recently
still i learn something new every day, so thanks.
( not that i have any suggestions but someday keyboard shortcuts need to become easily discoverable in context. )
Those are all examples where ye olde scrollbar would get the job done. As would the command line, but I don’t see anyone arguing in favor of that as a great UI element.
Those are also all examples of someone using a GUI without their preferred or required pointing device. As someone who has had a very solid relationship with a certain type of trackball for thirty years, and has even occasionally had to poke at one of them PC machines here and there, I am familiar. I typically just use the spacebar myself, but that’s not always an option either.
Agreed, but I wasn’t aware that I or anyone else was arguing for the removal of scroll bars everywhere. Only that they are a very flawed solution to the problem, and while they are a necessary fallback, they should not be on the first tier of the paradigm. Just like the command line.
The parts that haven’t changed since the first time a Bush was president:
Shift-Command-3 does the entire screen, file lands on the Desktop.
Shift-Command-4 gives you crosshairs to define a region, after which a file lands on the Desktop.
Another that was added the second time a Bush was president, if not earlier:
As for the new features, wow, TIL, thanks! But nothing changed, just stuff added. They added some GUI to support all the new variations, but it still fits within the old school Shift-Command-[0-9] format. There’s also a thing that pops up in the bottom corner of the screen right after you take a screenshot from the keyboard, to let you do stuff with it right then and there, but if you ignore that it just leaves the file on the desktop like it always has. Even if it is now a 32-bit PNG file instead of a 1-bit PICT resource.
Scrollbars are imperfect, but so is the QWERTY keyboard. What the scrollbar also is is universal, well-established, and well-understood – and that has incredible value in interaction desgin.
Wherever scrollbars are on the overall paradigm of interaction models, they should at least be usable for the people who want or need to use them. And the observation here is that, for many users, the current iteration of scroll bars is not.
The only argument that exists for the current trend is “Me like pretty things”, plus the desire to free up maybe a dozen pixel columns. The tradeoff fails in usability terms, on both heuristic and observational analyses. And if you prioritize aesthetics at the cost of functionality, you’re doing bad design.
That’s two arguments, but I think only the second one is really accurate.
I don’t know nearly enough about Apple’s reasoning, the broader trend to which you allude, or any of the sundry reasons that scrollbars should be the universal UI to which we all aspire, rather than a clunky mouse-centric fallback method. So I will instead Command-Tab my way back over to Audition so I can spend the rest of the day interacting with its big ’ole horizontal scroller-zoomer-thinger. Perhaps that will help me appreciate the classic X and Y scrollbars just that much more.
My view is that good design means balancing the various needs such that you achieve both form and function. So yeah, I agree. I just don’t see this situation as being reducible that.
ETA: But I did just realize that the scrollbar on a maximized window doesn’t respect Fitt’s Law, which is nuts.
ETA2:
Among a list of items of varying levels of contrivancy, I just noticed that this one is even more nuts than ignoring Fitt’s Law. The limits placed on dexterity by things like arthritis are exactly what make scrollbars such an ablist UI element. There is at least one computer/peripheral combo in this house right now on which I’d be unable to sanely manipulate a click-drag scrollbar based on the number of fully functional digits I woke up with this morning.
I’m using a mac, so I wouldn’t know. I have noticed that it is difficult to get my browser to even display a horizontal scrollbar.
They are a clunky fallback method for you. They are central to the interaction design for lots of people. Other users are not you.
There is no authority that says that we must design interfaces using method X or method Y. But if we make a choice that harms users, we need to do it with full awareness and, hopefully, with some sort of remediation available. Whether designers are creating harm negligently or deliberately is actually kind of secondary, but if they have empathy – which I’d argue is a required skill in UX – they need to recognize and correct for their failure, somehow. That approach might not necessarily be making scroll bars exactly like old scroll bars used to behave, but the fact that they’ve failed to account for how many users are actually attempting to use computers is telling.
It’s the same mentality behind Steve Jobs saying “You’re holding it wrong” when the iPhone 4’s design was criticized. Sorry, that’s not how it works. Not only are other users not you, but other users are not inferior versions of you, and telling them that they are doing it wrong is the antithesis of compassionate design.
There shouldn’t be one at all unless the content within the window is larger in that dimension.
Also, fun fact: MacOS isn’t limited to just X and Y scrolling. If you have a trackpad, as most Mac users do these days, you can see that any application with scrollable content handles movement in arbitrary directions just fine; the window edge scrollbars merely constrain that to X and Y.
What fundamental change to scroll bar behavior am I clearly not aware of? They still work just like they have for over thirty years. Yes, their visibility is context-dependent (depending on your Preference settings, of course), but I have great difficulty seeing that as any affront to usability. If all my GUI usage was based entirely on the muscle memory of dragging that damn little thinger around all day, I don’t see anything about MacOS 11.2 that would be any different in the slightest, except perhaps the Fitt’s Law thing, but I’m not actually sure if that was ever correct for scroll bars.
Many years ago I ran a computer lab full of WinBoxen. One afternoon we had a student who needed a course that wasn’t installed on that machine, so I had to copy it across the LAN. Remember the old animation of the two folders and the files glitterbombing their way from one to the other? After a few moments of us both watching that in silence he asks me, totally earnestly, “Can’t they just move the folders closer together?”
Does it matter if you are aware of it? People are complaining that scroll bars are hard to use. Respect that. “It works great for me” is, once again, not good UX.
(The main issues include:
Most of these have Fitts’ Law implications, but they also lead to basic “communication of state” failures.)
Is the fact that we cry out for listicles in the face of what we actually have evidence that this is, in fact, the darkest timeline?
Not if you prefer talking to yourself.
Sweep up the straw on your way out.
X) the focus on adding and change rather than striving for consistency in it just works. Make it more reliable, not fancier.
ETA: XI) and this post also reminds me I forgot my biggest beef, stop assuming you know what I want to do. I typed numbers with a ), I didn’t ask for it to be formatted, why would it do something I didn’t say to?
This one has been really worrying me the past year or so. I have always been able to count on that consistency, even in the era of megahertz measured in single digits, but lately, not so much it seems.
@Wazroth: It seems I was wrong about recent Mac OS scrollbars ignoring Fitt’s Law in full screen mode. They do just fine there, but Firefox, whose chrome certainly looks native, doesn’t. Which I find curious, but don’t currently know enough to even speculate about.
Speaking of ‘focus’, have we all just given up on complaining about focus-stealing, since we know MS is deeply committed to never fixing that? This used to be on nearly everyone’s list of Windows gripes.
Like the ever shrinking/disappearing chrome trend in UI design. These days in Windows 10 it can be near impossible to find your window because window borders have been shrunk down to 1px and things can just blend together. In the past, Windows had some ability to customize things some by giving you the ability to do things like configure title bar size and window border size and such, but that all went away in Windows 8.
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