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.
Eh, scrollbars are one of my least favourite UX design choices, though I respect that some people like them and do think that they should be a reasonable size for those who do want them.
There are so many better ways to navigate vertically scaling content now (not least of which, mousewheels). I think they served a good purpose in the early days of document editors and web browsers, but they’re a bit of an easy out for poorly laid out content.
It’s so much easier to just drag a scrollbar than use the mouse wheel to go past 1000s of lines - especially if you know how far down the bit you want is!
This is true for some things, but I still much prefer a ToC or a textual search, index, etc. for the majority of cases.
I find myself much more frequently ctrl+f -ing my way to content than doing scroll-and-scan nowadays.
Text search with indicators for the search results in the scroll bar is awesome
NGL, it is lit. But it’s kind of in minimap territory where you don’t actually need a scrollbar to give the same info. Definitely helps with seeing the density of results in certain areas of long docs
That is absolutely correct. Anyone who’s done office work or computer work with huge documents knows the true value of the classic scrollbar.
It is superior to the scroll wheel because it gives more powerful control over the same function, but since it is slightly harder to use than the wheel, the lazy users avoid it for mundane tasks.