A new trend that I’ve seen in UI design lately is to try to redesign the scrollbar. While I understand the good intentions, we’ve seen some particularly horrible examples of UX from these attempts.
A Horrible Idea
Reinventing or reskinning the scroll bar isn’t exactly a new phenonmenon. Ever since Flash became a popular medium, we’ve seen lots of different attempts to make scrollbars sexier.
Altering the scrollbars creates two problems:
- Scrollbars are a central part of the application
- Scrollbars are normally uniform across the OS of computer.
Scrollbars are Central to the application
Scrollbars are a tool to give access to content that normally wouldn’t fit on the user’s screen. They’re particularly important because screen sizes vary so widely. Altering the design or function of the scrollbars leaves you in danger of discouraging or disabling access to some of your content – content that you presumably want people to see!
Scrollbars are uniform across an OS
For most applications, scrollbar design is set by the OS, not the individual application (similar examples would be the minimize and close buttons, or with window chrome). Changing scrollbars for your particular application or website can be confusing because your UI will be an exception. Even if your design is good, you’re causing an initial element of confusion with your alternative view.
Examples
Ubuntu 11 and the Unity UI
The most notorious example of Scrollbar UI gone wrong is Ubuntu’s new Unity UI. Linux distributions have never been particularly pretty from a design point of view, but Unity was Canonical’s attempt at stepping into the 20th century with UI design and bringing Linux closer to Windows and Apple in visual appeal.
Unfortunately, the scrollbars in the new UI are particularly bad. As a slim coloured bar with no iconography, they’re largely hidden when not in use. The pop-up overlay is particulaly confusing, as it moves with your cursor even when not actively engaged.
Google Docs
I’m a huge fan of the clean design of Google now that they’ve launched Google Plus, but the scrollbars in Google Docs are not effective. Similar to Ubuntu, they’ve gone for the slim coloured bar with no iconography. There are also no buttons at the top or bottom as with traditional scrollbars. These scrollbars literally disappear into the screen noise. Not good.
Gawker
Gawker – The only indication that more content exists…
Worst of all designs is the new sidebar of Gawker. Their idea? No Scrollbars. They made the decision that between the scrollwheel and cursor (assuming the scrollbar has focus), the user should be able to figure out how to scroll.
This is awful for many reasons, but the biggest of which is that the user has no visual clue that more content even exists. Unless you magically happen to scroll while hovering over the scrollbar, you’ll miss that content. That’s downright awful.
I think I read somewhere that they’re planning on changing it back, and I certainly hope that’s the case.
Conclusion
Look, I get it. Scrollbars are dull and kind of ugly, and everyone would really be much happier if they were just a little more elegant, but please, do your users a favour, unless it’s absolutely mission critical to your application to modify the scrollbars AND you’ve done a ton of research and user testing on the new design, just leave them alone.
Please.
I think the approach will be the elimination of scrollbars in their entirety (except for page location reference sake). Once the move to full touch/gesture control for PCs take over, having a clickable scrollbar will be a thing of the past.
While this may be possible in the future, we’re not there yet. There are two hurdles in the way of touch/gesture taking over the PC:1) Software2) HardwareFor software, we need all OSs to natively support touch. Apple’s begun down this road, and Windows 8 will introduce the first steps of this to the Windows platform. It has to be ingrained in the OS because there are basic interactions across the platform that will need to be remapped.For hardware, it’s a larger problem. PCs aren’t oriented appropriately to take advantage of touch gesture appropriately, and it’s not a quick fix. If touch is to take over completely, which means that office workers use touch exclusively, we’ll need a radical new ergonomic solution to extended-use computing.Either way, we’re a ways off from this, and modifying your scrollbars to adapt to a far-future scenario isn’t effective.