Scrollbars are becoming a problem

KelsonV@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 595 points –
artemis.sh

Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback...

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And just straight up broken by idiocy like infinite scroll.

I would imagine the same designer who implements infinite scroll would also design bad scrollbars

I recently had to talk a designer out of implementing a “webpage progress indicator” that was a thin horizontal bar across the top of the page that filled in as you progressed through the content.

A few pages have those. What don't you like about them?

They are bad replicas of school bars. Except you can't use these to scroll the page and they use horizontal progress to express vertical progress. Everything they do could be done more effectively by having a visible scroll bar.

I don't see them as scroll bar replicas; good ones are very narrow but high contrast, to easily offer a compact visual sense of article length -- rather than page length, an important distinction when there are cited sources, recommended articles, and a footer menu. Different functions.

IMO, they should coexist with a well-designed vertical scroll bar.

Unless they were copying it from somewhere else, what were their arguments to implement it? Is it about gamefication of reading an article?

I like it for articles. It shows progress through the text, not down the page, which are two different metrics which can differ wildly.

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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.

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