I don't know, Windows 95 looked crude even during its day. Functional, but not pleasant. I guess Brutalist would be the term? As soon as there was the ability to skin it, people tried to veer away the default look, with Mac-like styles being a common alternative.
People probably have rose-tinted nostalgia for the 95 era because of the nightmare that followed: Windows XP :)
First my father upgrade our PC to Windows 95, coming from Windows 3.1 I thought it looked gorgeous. Some time passes by and my father come home with a Windows 95 Plus CD. Yep, that was the real deal. Lots of themes with different color schemes and sounds. I particularly remember the "mistery" theme. I could just sit there and look at it for hours.
Yeah Plus is one of my favorite memories of Windows too, which happened around the same time I discovered drivers to let me see more than 256 colors for the first time :)
XP was skinned like a very tacky Fischer Price toy, with garish colors and oversized elements that would have been more at home on a touchscreen. I don't think anyone called it a good theme unsarcastically. Why do we even need always visible scroll bars? They just take screen space and billions of people do fine without them on Macs and mobile OSes.
> Why do we even need always visible scroll bars? They just take screen space and billions of people do fine without them on Macs and mobile OSes.
Don't get me started.
Pros of a proper always-present scrollbar with appropriately-styled thumb:
- It indicates that the thing you're viewing even is scrollable.
- You can see at once where you are in a document, and how large it is relative to your viewport.
- It offers a convenient UI to scroll in both small or large amounts, or scroll to the very top or bottom. For lots of uses the scroll wheel on your mouse is a substitute, but certainly not for everything.
Cons:
- It takes a tiny bit of screen real estate
- It offends some people's esthetics taste, I guess
Yet weirdly, even with its "oversized" elements a typical Windows XP dialog still managed to present far more information on the screen than the corresponding Windows 10 dialog.
Almost like the removal of scrollbars had nothing to do with saving space.
To know how long the page is, to know what state we are BEFORE we interact with it, to know that there is no such a thing as "above the fold" or other nonsense, etc.
Now allow me to ask you, with no intention to sound like an ass: why would you hide bars apart from saving 20px (which I assume was Windows' default, but let's say 100px for discussion' sake)?
The unnecessary lack of visible scroll bars is super annoying to me, too. UI fashions at the expense of clarity. And let’s not even mention scrolljacking...
Why? How often the first thing you do is look at the scroll bar and close a document because it's too short or too long?
If you're gonna read it you'll read it regardless of its length.
If you want to do anything else, like printing, you'll see the document size.
> to know what state we are BEFORE we interact with it
Why? If you open a new document you'll be at the top.
It's almost always immediately obvious that there would be more text.
If it's a previously opened document then you may be in the position you were in when you last opened it. In which case, you would remember that you're not at the beginning or end, and again it's usually immediately obvious that you're not at the beginning or end.
We come down to these facts:
- There's almost NO case that's ALWAYS improved by having always visible bars.
- Hidden bars always save screen space for more content and reduced clutter.
- Literally billions of people are fine with hidden bars (iOS, Android, Mac)
- If you need to see scroll bars, there's an option, at least on Mac.
> Why? How often the first thing you do is look at the scroll bar and close a document because it's too short or too long?
> If you're gonna read it you'll read it regardless of its length.
Something short, looking remotely interesting, I'll probably read in full. Something long, I'll probably skim to see if there's anything interesting buried in there. If I'm reading it completely, glancing at the scroll bar tells me where I am in the document so it tells me if the document is reaching its conclusion, or perhaps just going on a side note.
If you read a book, don't you first see how thick it is, and while reading sometimes watch how far in the book you are?
>> to know what state we are BEFORE we interact with it
> Why? If you open a new document you'll be at the top.
A bit later, when I have read a page or two, how far have I advanced? How much more is there to come, or not?
> It's almost always immediately obvious that there would be more text.
It's most certainly not always immediately obvious. And even when it is, it is very useful to know how much more text (or other content).
> - There's almost NO case that's ALWAYS improved by having always visible bars.
Perhaps not. But there lots of cases that are almost always improved by proper scroll bars.
> - Hidden bars always save screen space for more content and reduced clutter.
A tiny amount, certainly on today's screens.
> - If you need to see scroll bars, there's an option.
Where? I mean, are we talking about UX design in general, or do you have an explicit implementation in mind where you can optionally enable scroll bars? I don't think I've ever seen such an option, and certainly not easily accessible.
> If I'm reading it completely, glancing at the scroll bar tells me where I am in the document so it tells me if the document is reaching its conclusion, or perhaps just going on a side note.
You'll see the hidden scrollbars when you're reading through something anyway.
> A bit later, when I have read a page or two, how far have I advanced?
You'll see the hidden scrollbars as you scroll through the pages to begin with.
> do you have an explicit implementation in mind where you can optionally enable scroll bars? I don't think I've ever seen such an option, and certainly not easily accessible.
It's right there in Mac general preferences, defaulting to visible if you use a non-Apple mouse.
I have heard this criticism so many times since Luna, and almost every single time I’ve noticed that Fisher-Price is misspelled by the critic. How can you trust someone like that?
Now that we have touch gestures we don’t really need visible scroll bars anymore do we? Just the little position indicator that pops up while scrolling.
What if you want to know the relative length of a page without scrolling first?
What if it's one of those webpages with a full height hero as the first element and no indicator you can actually scroll?
What if I want to click and drag the scroll to a specific location but have to take wild flailing guesses at where the scrollbar actually is because it keeps going invisible?
Well I just subjectively disagree - as apparently do the legions of professional experts at multiple distinct companies who research user interaction and design these interfaces.
I'm convinced designers have since long overthrown human-machine interaction experts, and usability consistently went down in the search for what's visually appealing and cleaner. I particularly blame Apple as a trend-setter in this, along with everyone that dumbly followed the fashion. No appeal to authority will ever convince me that disappearing scroll indicators are good for me, as I've been burned by them and I see less able people around me having ever increasing difficulty navigating modern interfaces thanks to similar innovations.
The "professional experts" are not interested in usability. They care only about sales and/or engagement. You can see this in every consumer product, not just software.
> An always visible scroll bar or indicator is conceptually simpler than one that disappears randomly.
An always visible scroll bar takes up a good chunk of screen space when you have multiple of them, and it's easy to develop intuition for what's scrollable and what isn't, just like we know what's right-clickable and what isn't.
It should be an option and it is, at least on Macs.
You just scroll a tiny bit and you can see. Doesn't need to on the screen all the time, taking up space, distracting from the content which is what I care about, rather than whizz-bang user-interface elements.
Me asking myself "how long is this article" before I start reading it is a distraction? Too bad, I can't help but want to know. I could've learned that instantly by unconsciously glancing at the scroll indicator, but instead I have to move the whole content down for it to appear (possibly with a whizz-bang animation, no less), introducing friction and further distracting me from the content. Good job, I guess.
I don't know what you tell you - most people don't think about user interfaces like this. As we can clearly tell by people not designing them like this anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, the people designing modern user interface styles are not doing it for my benefit.
They're doing it to sell adverts (removing the boundaries between content, forms and advertising), track where I'm looking (he's opened the scroll bar! our content is engaging/boring!), adopt fashions to make their competitors appear dated and justify their own careers.
More than that, it's totally adversarial. I don't think the interface on a typical website is just sloppy or badly designed; it's designed to hamper access to information in a very sophisticated way, in order to prevent people from getting what they are looking for and leaving, but at the same time keeping them on the hook with the perception they are almost there.
If I were to find a causal relation, it would be the opposite: people not expecting affordances such as scroll indicators would be a result of designers hiding them in the first place.
Most user interfaces are not designed any more with any intent to provide what's best for the user, because they are part of a product being sold to corporations/advertisers.
>Actually, yes, when was the last time you looked at a page number in an e-book?
Every time I read an ebook, I look at the page numbers. I would be frustrated without knowing where I am or how much longer I have to go
1. Is solved by "N Pages left in chapter" which is more useful than "Page N"
2. There is no "absolute number" of pages on a e-reader app or device because the window or font size can change, changing all the page numbers. You can have 100 pages or 200 pages.
1. It's also solved by X/Y where X: page number, Y: total pages.
2. Most users read from fullscreen readers on their phones or ebooks, so the window size doesn't really change. I also strongly advice setting on a font for a particular book and stick to it. From my POV (unbacked by science) it helps with recall. If you don't change the font or other layout settings, the "pages" retain their numeration.
> So you agree that there's an alternative solution to page numbers, but you want to go back to page numbers?
Yes, and I never had any reason to go away from them so I never did.
> Font sizes can change, changing the number of pages.
Fonts don't do it themselves, though.
Even Apple-designed software on Apple devices doesn't always have hints that an area is scrollable, and users missing features as a result. And in other ecosystems, doing that reliably is even harder, given the variation between devices. Always having a system-provided scroll indicator by default solves that universally.
People probably have rose-tinted nostalgia for the 95 era because of the nightmare that followed: Windows XP :)