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. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.

Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback…

  • LilDestructiveSheep@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Windex007@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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:

      1. A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.

      2. Development inertia where it’s seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners

      3. Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work

      4. 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.

      • Alatain@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That doesn’t explain why already established products are ditching things like plainly visible scroll bars in products like Microsoft word and other content viewers.

      • Emerald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        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.

  • jcdenton@lemy.lolEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Overlay scrollbars. Luckily in gnome and kde plasma you can disable them and get real always visible scrollbars

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean “things becoming shitty”. Just because “shit” is the base word doesn’t mean that’s what the whole word means.

          • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            No, it doesn’t.

            From Wikipedia:

            Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.

            From the guy who coined the term itself:

            Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.

            • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              Being a pedant is never a good look. You’re missing the larger point. The same corporate impulse that drives platform decay ripples out to things like UX design. And that impulse is: the customer doesn’t matter anymore, we already got your money, only what we want matters.