Scroll Bar Very Difficult to Utilize

[ciacci1234]

Dunno if this is a Mac-specific problem, or even something we could address, but the scroll bar, which appears on my laptop on the right side of the screen when visiting gerrymapper.org is very difficult to use. I can hardly click/hover over it to then utilize for scrolling the page up and down. Instead, I have to use the touchpad, which comes with the different problem of unintentionally zooming the map in and out.

Ideally, the design of the map and all it's corresponding info is going to be refactored, so perhaps this will be less of a problem in the future, but for now, it seems like a worthy problem to investigate 👌

[jonmast]

@ciacci1234 Are you referring to the auto-hide behavior that is causing the difficulty? It looks like we can force them to always be shown: https://davidwalsh.name/osx-overflow. Overriding default OS scrollbar functionality feels a bit hacky to me though, I'd prefer a cleaner solution.

I personally scroll using the touchpad in the footer area, that should work fairly reliably across devices. New users will inevitably scroll in the map though, so it would be good to optimize that experience if possible. We could add some padding on the sides for an additional "scroll surface", but I don't know if people would intuitively use it enough for it to be useful.

I think the ideal solution may be to move away from scrolling the window altogether and instead have scrollable content boxes. That way scrolling on the map would zoom the map, and scrolling on a content box would scroll its content if necessary. On smaller screens the content boxes could take the form of a dismissable overlay.

[jonmast]

@madeleine-williams I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on how to improve the UX here.

[madeleine-williams]

Hey all! I took a look in Chrome.. I agree that it's not clear that we'll need that scroll bar. It's really hard to say much about usability at this point, since I can only guess who are users are supposed to be. I'm trying to get in touch with someone at Fair Districts PA, and I'm going to talk to Aaron about it this weekend. Hopefully I'll have better answers by Monday-ish. Personally, I didn't even notice that there wasn't a scroll bar. I just use my touchpad, so a broken scroll bar isn't a problem for me at all. On the other hand, my grandpa only knows how to use the scroll bar, so he might have problems with basic functionality on this site. Another point: I notice that this only really becomes a problem for smaller browser window sizes. Would people know to just resize the window if they were having problems on their desktop? Or, would they just scroll with a finger if they were using a phone or tablet? Anyway, I'm not sure, but this isn't coming off like a huge problem to me. Maybe not worth the effort until the redesign suggests it's an important issue. Unless you're just curious! On Aug 18, 2017 8:23 PM, "Jonathan Mast" <notifications@github.com> wrote: @madeleine-williams <https://github.com/madeleine-williams> I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on how to improve the UX here. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#38 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AdLyMPq14Wi0gWUzasdtwtFl49Bertjzks5sZirugaJpZM4OyKND> .

[ciacci1234]

@jonmast I like the idea of having modular content boxes which you could scroll separately from the map. @madeleine-williams You are right this does seem like more of an issue with smaller window sizes, so perhaps the solution would be to have some styling changes to be triggered for smaller window sizes that would be the content easily scrollable/accessible.

I agree with your guys' thought that this isn't a big issue, so I'm gonna tag this one as low-priority 👍