> We already hide 99.9999% of things that provide the user with information. Thank god, because the real maxim should be don't overload the user with information
> We try to show only the things that show the most useful information at the times it's needed, and hide them the rest of the time.
Surely there's a middle ground between showing a user everything and showing a user practically nothing and then trying to guess what they might need.
Software that tries to figure out what I want instead of just letting me just pick what I want is, frankly, annoying. How does software handle a situation where an option I might want is hidden because I have a use case that the developers didn't anticipate?
> Knowing where in the document you are isn't usually that useful.
Disagree. If I'm reading a document on the Internet, I probably don't know how long it is before I start reading it (and those ridiculous tags that say an article is XX minutes long are almost always so wrong that they're useless for me). If I'm scrolling with my scroll wheel, I'm probably not paying attention to the scroll bar. If I've been reading said document for fifteen minutes and I want to know approximately how far into the document I've read (and if I have any hope of finishing it up in the time before I have to do something else) the position of the box in the scroll bar is a great way for me estimate that at a glance. Jiggling the page or moving the mouse all the way to the side or doing some other incantation to make it appear completely breaks my flow reading the document and can make me easily lose my place (especially if I'm in the middle of a paragraph). A quick glance at the scroll bar also breaks the flow, but not quite as badly, and it's a lot easier to resume where I left off.
> Surely there's a middle ground between showing a user everything and showing a user practically nothing and then trying to guess what they might need.
Yes, that's what software already does. And a scroll bar that appears but only when you jiggle the scroll is that middle ground.
> Software that tries to figure out what I want instead of just letting me just pick what I want is, frankly, annoying.
That's literally all software though.
Otherwise every screen would be covered in every possible option, and would be unusable.
> We try to show only the things that show the most useful information at the times it's needed, and hide them the rest of the time.
Surely there's a middle ground between showing a user everything and showing a user practically nothing and then trying to guess what they might need.
Software that tries to figure out what I want instead of just letting me just pick what I want is, frankly, annoying. How does software handle a situation where an option I might want is hidden because I have a use case that the developers didn't anticipate?
> Knowing where in the document you are isn't usually that useful.
Disagree. If I'm reading a document on the Internet, I probably don't know how long it is before I start reading it (and those ridiculous tags that say an article is XX minutes long are almost always so wrong that they're useless for me). If I'm scrolling with my scroll wheel, I'm probably not paying attention to the scroll bar. If I've been reading said document for fifteen minutes and I want to know approximately how far into the document I've read (and if I have any hope of finishing it up in the time before I have to do something else) the position of the box in the scroll bar is a great way for me estimate that at a glance. Jiggling the page or moving the mouse all the way to the side or doing some other incantation to make it appear completely breaks my flow reading the document and can make me easily lose my place (especially if I'm in the middle of a paragraph). A quick glance at the scroll bar also breaks the flow, but not quite as badly, and it's a lot easier to resume where I left off.