There's been an ongoing trend in UI design in recent years to assume more and more of the user.
The removal of scrollbars from browsers confused my parents. Instead of having up and down arrows by your content now you're just expected to just know that you scroll with your mouse / trackpad. Similarly, modern versions of Windows will just assume you know that the four squares at the bottom of your screen is where you need to click to start using your computer, and Mac will just assume you know the red dot closes the current window. These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer because they haven't yet learnt all the required prerequisite UI patterns. Even as a power user if you switch from Windows to Mac (or vice versa) it often takes some time just figure out all of the completely unintuitive modern UI because the UI designer is lazily assuming you already know how to do everything...
Just yesterday my girlfriend (who uses her computer almost every day) asked me for help replying to an email in outlook on her laptop. Confused I asked, "what do you mean you need help replying to an email?". Well, she was confused because she doesn't use outlook much and didn't know she needed to click the small curved arrow icon to reply to an email. For the last 5 minutes she had been stupidly looking for a button that said "reply".
While I completely agree with your sentiment about scroll bars, I feel like this a much bigger issue and one that web developers shouldn't be required to fix. The core issue here is that your OS / browser shouldn't be hiding your scrollbar to begin with... This isn't something web developers should be addressing, but the UI designers who think it's preferable for me to have a browser URL bar that is 80% of my screen width at the expense of the word "back" on my back button.
> And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer
It goes the other way as well lol. There's lots of ridiculous random gestures for android/iOS
In general it feels like a lot of UI design these days is optimizing for looking pretty in screenshots and photos rather than being useful as a tool, it's honestly gotten really frustrating in recent years.
A month or so ago, a screenshot of Snow-Leopad-era OS X standard UI controls made the rounds on the fediverse. One forgets so fast with incremental change, but when you take it in with some distance, it’s truly devastating how things have regressed since that time.
The Apple folk and adjacent circles like to throw around how “design is how it works™”, but design hasn’t been how it works in Macos for a while (and it’s not better anywhere else).
> These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
They're obvious to power users because we have seen them a million times before.
When a web developer does a custom scroll bar that is when "average" users get confused, because suddenly they're presented with something they haven't seen.
It's not too much to expect a user to know how scrolling works by default in their client operating system/browser. It _is_ asking too much to expect users to know how scrolling works when you customise how it works. Web developers should not be touching this stuff.
The removal of scrollbars from browsers confused my parents. Instead of having up and down arrows by your content now you're just expected to just know that you scroll with your mouse / trackpad. Similarly, modern versions of Windows will just assume you know that the four squares at the bottom of your screen is where you need to click to start using your computer, and Mac will just assume you know the red dot closes the current window. These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer because they haven't yet learnt all the required prerequisite UI patterns. Even as a power user if you switch from Windows to Mac (or vice versa) it often takes some time just figure out all of the completely unintuitive modern UI because the UI designer is lazily assuming you already know how to do everything...
Just yesterday my girlfriend (who uses her computer almost every day) asked me for help replying to an email in outlook on her laptop. Confused I asked, "what do you mean you need help replying to an email?". Well, she was confused because she doesn't use outlook much and didn't know she needed to click the small curved arrow icon to reply to an email. For the last 5 minutes she had been stupidly looking for a button that said "reply".
While I completely agree with your sentiment about scroll bars, I feel like this a much bigger issue and one that web developers shouldn't be required to fix. The core issue here is that your OS / browser shouldn't be hiding your scrollbar to begin with... This isn't something web developers should be addressing, but the UI designers who think it's preferable for me to have a browser URL bar that is 80% of my screen width at the expense of the word "back" on my back button.