Hidden interface controls that affect usability

In the 90's I had this vision that the menu and the scrollbar should be physically separated from the screen.

If you have (next to your monitor on the left side) a narrow physical display with menu entries in it. You get 4 things for "free", the user will expect there to be menu entries, the developer will understand the expectations to have menu entries, there is limited room to go nuts with the layout or shape of the menu and last but most funny, you won't feel part of the screen has been taken away from you.

The physical scrollbar should be a transparent tube with a ball (or ideally a bubble) floating in it.

Usage could be moving the pointer out of the screen. The scrollbar led goes on and you can hold the button to move the page. When using the menu the pointer [also] vanishes and the menu entry at that height is highlighted. (much better usability) Moving the mouse up or down highlights the above or below entries, if there are a lot of entries it may also scroll. It may be a touch screen but the most usuable would be a vertical row of 5 extra wide (3 fingers) keyboard buttons on the left with the top 4 corresponding to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th menu entry and the 5th one for page down. (scrolling down 4 entries) Ideally these get some kind of texturing so that one can feel which button one is touching.

This way knowledge in the world can smoothly migrate to knowledge in the head until eventually you can smash out combinations of M keys in fractions of a second without looking at the screen or the keyboard. The menu displayed is always in focus, you don't have to examine the view port to use it. Having a row of horizontal F keys is a design fiasco. Instinctively bashing the full row of those might come natural after learning to type, then learning to type numbers, then symbols and only if you frequently use applications that have useful F key functionality. I only really know F5 and F11 but I cant smash them blindly as I pretty much never use them. I just tried F1 in firefox and no help documentation showed up... I think that was what it was suppose to do? Not even sure anymore.

Having the antenna menu (file, edit, etc) at the top of the viewport is also ugly. For example, smashing the second then the top M key could easily become second nature. CTRL+Z is fine of course but it aint knowledge in the world. Does anyone actually use ALT+E+U for undo? Try it on the CTRL+F input area. It's just funny. Type something in the address bar then compare ALT+E+U with using the Edit menu.

A separate display would take many of these "design" privileges away from the clowns.

(note: I think it is ALT+E+U as the Dutch layout is forced on me by windos. Edit is called Bewerken and the shortcut is ALT+W!?! ALT+E does nothing.)

> The physical scrollbar should be a transparent tube with a ball (or ideally a bubble) floating in it.

Oh, god, the Touch Bar was already a frustrating enough piece of UI, don't give Apple more ideas.

Amen. Good riddance to Jony Ive and his embarrassing emoji bar.

No one wants or needs an entire seperate device just to handle scrollbars that work absolutely fine currently…

It was just a vision from long ago. But okay, for sake of argument. It doesn't need to be ultra hd in a billion colors, it can go on the bezel and be screen height so that you don't have to aim to hit it. No need for it to glow intensely, perhaps not at all, perhaps simple single color LCD would do the trick.

I don't agree scrollbars work fine, they use to work fine, now they are to tiny to click on.

There also was/is the issue where the view port width needs to be adjusted when page state grows beyond the screen height then word wrap makes the content shift down. Is the solution to have one so tiny it is hard to use or should one always display a scrollbar? The one outside the screen is always there :)

I like things that do only one thing, do it well and in a simple way.

You could also go the other direction and put everything on the screen. Huawei just made a horrifying laptop where the keyboard is also a screen.

touch screens cant match physical buttons. This one is extra funny by taking keys away and giving you unknown things in return. Finally one can once again look down at the keys wondering which is which. After moving your hands away.

If I was on the design team they would have fired me for screaming at everyone. Screaming is good UI tho.

> In the 90's I had this vision that the menu and the scrollbar should be physically separated from the screen.

Buttons alongside, above, or below screens appear now and then. Some early terminals had them. Now that seems to be confined to aircraft cockpits and gasoline dispensers.

BTW. The technical term for such a button is a "soft key", vs a "hard key" that has a single function.

I would have been fine with the Touch Bar, if they hadn't sacrificed the function/escape keys to put it there.

It enabled a neat set of affordances, but not worth losing core functionality over.

> If I was on the design team they would have fired me for screaming at everyone.

Oh man. I really do start screaming sometimes.

At user interfaces, too often. At unbelievably bad product choices of all kinds.

The simpler & dumber the issue the louder I get.

Someone creates a quality flat tine garden rake with about 40 metal tines, and charges accordingly. The person who manages stickers, because everything needs stickers, creates huge stickers they glue across all the tines. You try to peel it off and now you have over two dozen tines with long streaks of shredded paper glued hard to them.

Screaming is an appropriate place to put the high spin WTF-a-tons that might otherwise feed the universe’s dark energy.

And that, dear reader, is my theory of dark energy.

Other applications ...

Some ATMs have unmarked physical buttons next the screen and tge text displayed on the screen next to those buttons defines what the key does.

TV remotes have A/B/C/D (red/blue/green/yellow) physical buttons whose function is dynamically defined by your context or which setting / function / menu you are currently inside.

I guess this goes back to video game controllers that have A/B X/Y buttons that can have different Functions in different contexts.

...And how should this work for the case where you have more than one window on the screen?

Speak for yourself. Id love this as a monitor attachment!

You start with something that works but is obviously wrong for reasons unknown. Then you think you've unraveled one of the wrong doings and think you've found a solution to make it better. Both are most likely wrong and your solution made things worse. This becomes obvious later on when you have a whole list of imaginary improvements. You keep at it and slowly the stupid simple truth comes out or so you think. Hey, at least it improved over what it was? You then have people use it, dumb people are best so that you can feel dumb together when it becomes obvious that obvious wasn't what you thought it was. You fix everything until it is good enough to alienate existing users. More effort goes in and finally you allow yourself to add one new button. This is it? Everyone asks. YES, this is it. But what about... and you tell them why that is not going to happen or they come up with one more something that sounds actually good but most likely isn't.

The analogy is probably to start with a 5G wifi HD camera doorbell with cloud hosting, night vision, human body motion detection zones and you end with a heavy duty cast iron door knocker that has one moving part and instantly reveals something personal about the person at the door. A small art work depicting something about you. They come as dragons, goats, unicorns, vikings, snakes, Bumble bees, Longhorns, Moose, Neptune, Bacchus, all kinds of tools and all kinds of symbols. Build to last many times longer than the house.

And then people cant find the bell...

we have that case well researched :) You paint a scrollbar on the screen. Boring technology.

Fair enough, not sure there’s enough interest for a general product but sounds like a fun weekend project if you have an old display lying around

Why are you trying to actually click on a scroll bar? That’s my biggest question, the reason they’re small and out of the way is because 99% of people don’t use them 99% of the time. I can’t even remember the last time I actually clicked on one. That’s what scroll wheels/gestures are for.

You ok man?

On further thought this is an idea for a bygone era. I liked the idea of it being on the monitor bezel...Most monitors dont have bezels, or bezels big enough for it, nowadays.

It does a few things.

If you are reading (top to bottom) the wheel is really useful. It scrolls in chunks tho. A touch pad is more accurate but I always attach a mouse to my laptops. Not sure why but it feels less convenient than the scroll wheel.

If you need to travel slightly further dragging the middle mouse "button" is great. I have no idea how to do that with a touch pad but one can also use page up and page down (or [shift+]space when available)

If pages or documents are really long it isn't fast enough. I might roughly know where the thing I'm looking for is. Holding down the mouse button on that offset. Is faster.

The scrollbar does both extremely fast and fine scrolling. I rarely start reading a page of code from the top. The larger sections are usually the most relevant. Here I hold the scroll bar and move it up and down quickly and accurately while reading.

But the real trick is that it doesn't affect the cursor position. You can scroll then continue typing and it will jump to the cursor. [say] inline ccs, I'm typing some html but need to lookup what some class name was called. I can scroll to it, read and continue typing. Same for the name of functions and variables defined elsewhere in the same file. Or [say] I don't recall how to write someones name eventho I've already used it in the same article.

You make some good points, but for contrast I thought I’d share my workflow in those same situations. For scrolling in chunks, this isn’t the case with many mice and is OS dependent too - Magic Mouse on the Mac is a good example of a smooth scrolling experience with a mouse, but on my windows machine I use a Logitech g502 which had the ability to toggle between a clicked and unlclicked mouse wheel state, which I can use both for precision and for speed scrolling to the top or bottom (unclick, spin with wild abandon, click in again).

As for the text editor example I use the preview scroll pane on the right and drag that for that use case, it’s a huge grab target and a great example of a situation where this is relevant but it has its own solution.

Either way, if you really want scrollbars to always stay visible in your browser there are solutions to force show it all the time, but I’d say you were a rare user in actually wanting that.