Scrolling is Painful Enough REDUX
One of my first posts was in regards to custom scrollbars - a way that designers can take an already cumbersome interaction and turn it up to 11.
With the release of Office 2008, I had a quick visit over at Mactopia, Microsoft’s Mac homepage which received a recent revamp. Clicking on each Office product kicks off a Flash movie. During the movie, different areas of the screen activate depending on which feature is being discussed. I had a look at the Entourage video.
This is something I’ve never seen before.
The extreme ends of the scrollbar aren’t anchored. The entire thing moves when you drag it. I thought the interface was broken when I picked it up.
Why go to all this effort when they could have just used a few more vertical pixels and shown the entire paragraph? My guess is the designer valued uniformity and alignment of the text blocks over functionality. Nope, take a look at the full row of text.
They aren’t uniform to begin with.
“Well Rob, there was probably a lot of scrolling and it would have really knocked things out of whack.” Actually, there’s about 10 pixels worth to scroll, if that. The initial viewport obscures about half a line of text.
I’m amazed how we find new and interesting ways to abuse scrollbars. I hope the irony of that section’s name (”Tame the Chaos”) isn’t lost on anyone :)