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.
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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.
Enshittification of "enshittification"
/s
Enshittiception
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.
Feels like it's always been a buzzword for whatever someone doesn't like right now
Buy!!!?
[no]
You know that the [no] option would be [maybe later]
I FUCKING HATE THIS
[keep reminding me til I accidentally click yes or just fold]
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
They want you doom scrolling.
It's one reason I like kbin. I'll read to page 5 and that's my limit for a session. Endless scrolling is annoying.
On kbin you have the choice to set it to doom scroll if you want.
Choice is the important thing with something like doom scrolling.
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:
A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.
Development inertia where it's seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners
Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work
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.
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.
That's true. I can speak from experience how I've seen it go down in many products, but no idea what apple and Microsoft are thinking.
It's bizarre, because usually at some point in size, companies will start to explicitly have accessibility UAT processes. Even directorship roles specifically with that responsibility
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.
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.
I love it when scrollbars are like, half an atom wide. Makes it easy to use the website.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 would like my scroll bars back please. Scroll wheel on a mouse is not enough. Neither is a fling gesture on touchpad or screen.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Even using pc all day I can't click a scroll bar on the first time!