Timeline for Are custom scroll bars easier to use or do they just look "nice"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 3, 2011 at 18:11 | comment | added | xmjx | @VitalyMijiritsky The SIGCHI paper operationalized "apparent usability" (not "usability") by asking participants how usable they found the interface. This is interesting from a marketing standpoint but just a sorry excuse for a usability surrogate measure. My personal (not so uneducated) guess is that the correlation measured there came from the fact that participants (1st year engineering students) could not discriminate between aesthetics and usability. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 17:57 | comment | added | Vitaly Mijiritsky | @xmjx 1) The google link gives you quite a few of those. The most famous is probably Tractinsky 1997 2) I said aesthetics help usability, not that they're the only factor affecting it. A beautiful thing can very well be completely unusable, but with other factors being equal, a beautiful thing is more usable than an ugly thing. 3) Since "pleasing/fun to use" is one of the popular measures of usability, you've got aesthetics embedded in the very definition. And yes, definitions is something you can argue about forever. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 17:40 | comment | added | xmjx | @VitalyMijiritsky First I thought, oh, wow. Sorry. You provided a reference. But after glancing over it, I feel I should have made myself clearer: Do you have any reference to a scientific paper that provides empirical evidence that aesthetics helps usability? Funnily, the lemon squeezer on the book cover shown at the right of the page you linked to is a striking example of an aesthetically pleasing piece of art that is absolutely horrible to use and, thus, provides a counterexample. Also, if you give statements as in #1 I think you should provide references, not your readers. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 14:18 | comment | added | Vitaly Mijiritsky | @xmjx In addition to the link that's already there, you get plenty of articles if you just google aesthetics help usability. | |
| Oct 2, 2011 at 20:25 | vote | accept | nhinkle | ||
| Sep 30, 2011 at 11:43 | comment | added | Vitaly Mijiritsky | @Charles Right, but that only refers to cases where the custom scroll bar spans the entire screen, not to smaller elements. | |
| Sep 29, 2011 at 20:55 | comment | added | Charles Boyung | Re: #2 - If there is a custom scroll bar next to the browser scroll bar, I would argue that it shouldn't even be there. Use the tools provided for you - just use the scroll bar that is part of the browser and get rid of your custom one entirely. | |
| Sep 29, 2011 at 11:27 | history | edited | Patrick McElhaney | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added a citation
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| Sep 29, 2011 at 10:21 | history | answered | Vitaly Mijiritsky | CC BY-SA 3.0 |