Apple’s OSX Lion Magic Trick: Disappearing Scrollbars

 

Image by Tambako the Jaguar via Flickr

 

It seems that Apple might change the way scrollbars look and act in the next major OSX release, called Lion (10.7, due out in Summer ’11).

Obviously, this is an attempt to make the UI more iOS-like and be less cluttered. But is this the right thing to do? Let’s try to answer a few design-oriented questions to find out.

Do scrollbars take too much room? It seems that Steve Jobs thinks so. To a user on the iPhone and iPad, this is true. The scrollbars reserve space on many of your windows; precious real estate when your screen is only 3.5 inches across.

But does it take up too much room for the desktop user? Probably not. Screen resolutions–even on the Macbooks–are getting pretty big. I think the common user can spare the space. The Mac OS scrollbar is just the right size to find and use.

Despite that, I find myself hardly ever using the scrollbar anyway. Today, practically every mouse (or trackpad) available to buy has a scrolling function built into it.

Are scrollbars too distracting? Maybe. The worse thing about the standard Mac OS scrollbar, is that it’s bright blue. (This is a remnant from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah’s Aqua UI.) And since the scrollbar is extended in many instances, the bright blue bar sticks out. This is more so than any other UI element. They’re down-right ugly, to some users.

Professional users would rather switch the appearance to graphite and better concentrate on the content of the window itself. Even some of Apple’s own applications, like Aperture, Color and all the new iLife applications, use non-standard scrollbars.

 

 

iPhoto's non-standard scrollbars in iLife '11

 

If they are distracting, would you hide them or do something else? Hiding scrollbars seems like overreacting, doesn’t it? I’m sure many people would rather Apple just switch to a simple white on black scroll bar (with a 3D look, of course), like the scrollbar used in Facetime for the Mac.

 

Facetime for the Mac

 

Would you fade them out to half opacity or hide them completely? Maybe a better thing to do would be fade the opacity of the scrollbars by a half. Doing this would keep them out of the way, but keep its on-screen usefulness to those who need it. On the other hand, hiding the scrollbar would take away the distraction completely.

How would you reveal a hidden scrollbar? I see two ways Apple could decide to reveal the scrollbar:

• When you hover your mouse mouse over (or around) the area where the scrollbar is. The downside is that the user wouldn’t know that there’s a scrollbar with which to interact until they accidentally discover it by the mouse-over.
• Whenever the mouse moves. The downside: scrollbars that appear and disappear that often would become very irritating very quickly.

Of course, I’m sure a hidden scrollbar would also reveal itself when someone uses a scroll wheel, ball, or scrolling action on their mouse/trackpad.

If you hide them, would the user miss the information they provide at a glance? There are two pieces of information that today’s scrollbars give:

• How big the document is.
• Where in the document you currently are.

There are only a few applications where users, at any given moment, want to know this. These are applications that handle long documents (or timelines). For example: word processors like Pages, document readers like Preview (when it’s a long document), and video editing apps like Final Cut.

Alternatively, I don’t think I’d miss them in web browsers, iTunes, iPhoto, or even Finder.

However, I can understand that there will be a few instances where a hidden scrollbar might cause a user to miss information further off the page.

At what level would hidden scrollbars be decided? There are many ways Apple could implement disappearing scrollbars:

• System wide: All applications are forced to adopt hiding scrollbars. (Well, applications that use standard scrollbars at least.)
• System user option: The users decide to turn this on or off through a system preference checkbox, much like how users can decide if the scroll arrows are placed together or not.
• Per application: Mac developers decide if the application they create has disappearing scrollbars or not. (This one seems the most likely.)
• Application user option: Users of an application turn it on or off through an application preference.

If the scrollbars are too distracting, what about the rest of the window interface elements? If Apple really does want a cleaner window, then it doesn’t have to stop at the scrollbars. Apple could hide titlebars, toolbars, and expansion boxes. Apple’s embrace of full screen applications are already a step in this direction. Even Quicktime X–which has been out for a while now–has controls and a title bar that hide.

Choosing to hide scrollbars is an interesting design choice, eh? If you were an Apple developer, what would you do?

Related Articles

• Thoughts on Mac OS X Lion (appreaders.com)
• Apple previews upcoming Mac OS X Lion (macworld.com)