Saturday, September 12, 2020

the ux of scroll direction: natural and y-axis: inverted

I recently reconfigured my work-from-home desk to have my laptop on a stand - it raises the webcam to a more flattering level, makes its screen easier to glance at (next to my main monitor, rather than beneath), and keeps my wrists from the unpleasant heat of a warm machine.

I switched to a plain old mouse after a failed attempt to use a "magic trackpad" in a laptop-like configuration. Macs are frustrating though because they have a single "scroll direction: natural" setting that applies to both mice and touchpads - but I want exactly opposite behaviors for the two.

The "Natural" setting makes the touchable surface of the trackpad act like the surface of an iPad: if the image on the screen were of a piece of paper, it's like you're dragging the paper with your two fingers - so to see the lower part of the paper in the glass of the screen, you drag up. 

But historically, mice scroll by dragging a little marker in the scrollbar, and in the 90s mice added a physical scrollwheel (it's so nice to have that physicality back with my cheap bluetooth mouse - though occasionally frustrating since I can't easily scroll left and right with it.) Anyway, with that scroll marker, moving up moves the viewport up... so if you want to see the "lower part of the paper in the glass of the screen" you drag down.

But Apple treats this as one setting! (I'm not sure what it feels like to use Apple's "magic mouse" that has a trackpad-ish surface...) There are programs that allow you set the two differently, but the hack I installed long ago has noticeable lag where a scroll starts moving the wrong way and then corrects.

There's an interesting parallel to life in video games, especially 3D run around and shoot games. The "standard" controls for aiming the crosshairs make a certain amount of intuitive sense: if the target is above where you are aiming, press up on the controller to aim at it. But for a certain population of gamers they will immediately head to settings to reverse that y-axis - they want to press down to aim at the higher target.

This diagram attempts my best guess as to why:


The first example, "normal", shows how the controller (represented as a compass rose) is mapped to the tip of the gun. So to aim at the higher target, you press up (and the character in the viewport moves down).

Gamers who prefer inverted controls do a different mapping... it's to the viewpoint, or you could say the top of the avatars head. To hit a higher target you pull down - or rather, back, and the viewport slides up.

The third sketch shows how this is akin to how flight simulators or flying games in general work - a pilot pulls back on the flight stick (which corresponds to down on a more humble controller) and the plane tips back and ascends. 

I find this difference in expectation among gamers fascinating (and frustrating; some games, like "Luigi's Mansion 3", don't bother to put in a control scheme to accommodate the "inverted" preference.) I think gamers who grew up with keyboard controls, mouse aiming will hardly ever long for inverted-Y controls

And there's that parallel with the mouse/trackpad scrolling: my girlfriend thinks I'm weird for ever using "natural" scroll for my Mac trackpad - I'm guessing her model of it is based on the scroll position and/or the viewport, rather than the content.

And they say there's a similar ambiguity in how people map space and time - does "we had to push the meeting forward 2 days" mean the meeting is now earlier or later than it was planned? Your answer may have to do with if you see yourself as fixed, and time heading towards you, or time is fixed and you are travelling through it... and some cultures have entirely different ways of mapping the two.

Fun stuff in UX! Don't assume your audience maps space the same way you do...

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