98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

There’s always obscure use cases like this. You could go on forever listing individual people’s wants and you’d end up with a Homer car.

We design interfaces for the many first, and keep them as simple as possible but not simpler.

An always visible scroll bar or indicator is conceptually simpler than one that disappears randomly.

Knowing that a view is scrollable and there's more content to see is absolutely not an obscure edge case but a basic accessibility feature.

Relevant past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951580

Also relevant, what happens when the user doesn't realize more content is available: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920

Knowing how long a document is, and whereabouts your current view is, seems pretty fundamental.

You may as well argue against page numbers in books.

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.

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.

> 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 may as well argue against page numbers in books.

Actually, yes, when was the last time you looked at a page number in an e-book? They don't make sense anyway when you can resize the reader.

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.

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.

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.

There are margins on the screen 95% of the time, it's a perfect place for a tiny 1-3px scroll indicator.

Actually, they very much do:

1. As a relative marker of a current position.

2. As an absolute number when your ebook/reader screws up saving its state.

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.

>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

> We design interfaces for the many first, and keep them as simple as possible but not simpler.

The many being able bodied, literate, touch-device-carrying people? I am not sure interfaces should be designed like that.

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.

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.

> 1. It's also solved

So you agree that there's an alternative solution to page numbers, but you want to go back to page numbers?

> 2. Most users read from fullscreen readers on their phones or ebooks, so the window size doesn't really change.

Font sizes can change, changing the number of pages.

> 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.

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.

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.