I hate sticky headers I hate sticky headers

[Tozovac]

So Jony Ive decided in 2013 that we're better off having to press and swipe more often to get things done that used to take just one click. This involved hiding navigation tools in safari for iOS, claiming this was in the name of providing more useful work space. CAN ANYONE PROVIDE ONEGOOD REASON FOR STICKY HEADERS, WHICH NOW WASTE SPACE ON AN ALREADY SMALL IOS SCREEN, NEGATING THE "IMPROVEMENT" OF HIDING SAFARI CONTROLS WHICH SHOULD BE A STICKY. THESE ARE AS DUMB A DESIGN IDEA AS LIGHT GREY FONT ON WHITE BACKGROUNDS. WHY? WHY. WHY!!!

Really. Can you web designers who are reading this please stop fooling around in adding these unnecessary features and changes? Can't we all go back to web/UI design of 2012, and instead move your efforts magically somehow to focus efforts on curing cancer, preventing war, helping the homeless and hungry, and finding a cure for a baldness?

God I hate sticky headers. Why? Why? Why sticky headers.

 

[theluggage]

CAN ANYONE PROVIDE ONEGOOD REASON FOR STICKY HEADERS

Are you saying that you don't like sticky headers?

The role of sticky headers should be to provide in-site navigation, as distinct from the between site navigation provided by the browser nav bar. They're quite different functions. So sticky headers should be there to offer features like hopping to the next/previous page of the current site or jumping to a selected section, or hopping to bookmarks on the current page. For example, a site designed for the desktop that might have had a 'table of contents/site map' side bar with the current page highlighted - the classic 3-pane layout - now needs a pop-up menu control and next/previous page buttons for mobile. So the designer would need some reason to believe that the user needed quick access to those functions, or wouldn't notice them if they were at the top.

If you're producing something that's more app-like than an old-school website, its useful to have the inter-site navigation out of the way so you can produce your own nav bar.

If its there just so the user can "enjoy" the ads or never lose sight of the beautiful logo that cost you a 5-digit sum from the corporate identity gurus then, yeah, bad.

I've toyed with them from time-to-time but normally gone back to "keep it simple".

 

[Tozovac]

Thanks for your reply. Ha yeah, I do dislike them. Glad you stick to the Simple when possible! I remain convinced that sticky headers are just bad band-aids for bad web/iOS design fads forced upon us recently, some making others worse at times... Too many more clicks/swipes/presses/scrolling are required now to accomplish what used to require way fewer, and sticky headers add way too many more swipes from the reduction of available screen area). So Jony Ive starts hiding functions/buttons behind layers of menus for a cleaner interface (like removing the sticky iOS safari toolbar, adding a small bit of screen area but nearly doubling the number of clicks in a given session when needing to pop out the bar...click click swipe click), and then web sites start to bloat up with too much wasted/unusable white space and hero images (swipe swipe scroll swipe)....and then comes an "improvement" of sticky headers to re-show some previously hidden buttons 24/7 and also reduce having to swipe all the way up an already unnecessarily bloated web page...but which take up valuable screen space and therefore CAUSE EVEN MORE scrolling/swiping...so then you put aside your now too-overly-thought-out iPhone and grab your laptop only to see the same page optimized for mobile devices (another awful design fad that has to go...there's a reason bedrooms aren't designed with tile floors like bathrooms)...and there's that damn sticky header in place of a well-planned site optimized for desktop use....!!! GAHH!!!!

Ever since Steve Jobs passed and Jony Ive somehow got UI, there's been just too much unnecessary tinkering and change just for the sake of change. Rather than admit the mistakes of the last 3-4 years, the band-aids pile on and often cause just more issues. Sticky headers are just another unnecessary fad that will hopefully go by the wayside once the design world resumes some level of sanity.

Perhaps the most offending example is the Apple user/community help forum, which was "improved" by the exorcism of all the helpful borders and organized "information zones/panels" of boxes/sections typical to a forum (and which used to provide helpful organization & context)...replaced with tons of open white space (w/o any organized gridwork/layout that really help data-heavy pages...can you imagine using Excel w/o gridlines), large space-wasting thin fonts, and a floating sticky header that merely repeats the topic until you X out of it, again wasting space just because it's something different Jony wanted to try, and adding more clicks than should be needed.

 

[Pakaku]

Sticky-footers would be better, ergonomically. Maybe even a floating collapsed button that only expands when clicked on. And I'm sure there are plenty of ways to dynamically change the header/footer CSS depending on screen size, but obviously many websites don't even bother. I sure love when websites load iPhone-designed layouts on my iPad...

 

[Tozovac]

I just hate the games it seems Apple & developers are playing today with these various "enhancements" that actually introduce more negative trade-offs than actual improvement. First Apple removes the sticky toolbar for iOS (around iOS7?), requiring to you perform extra actions to enable back/forward, bookmark, send, tabs tools...the usual "require more user actions/input steps to perform what used to take 1 step before iOS7" crap, using the excuse that Apple is helping by giving more screen space...followed by this sticky toolbar fad where websites (including Apple, for their horrible revamped user help community forum) now not only take up some 15-25% of the screen space, forcing upon the user permanent access to garbage links that need not be stickified and should be optional (facebook/twitter/pinterest, etc.), but any scrolling sometimes enters a herky-jerky dance where the header appears then disappears then reappears, each time moving your text often in a way that it covers up what you were about to read. Argh, it's like most every iOS & web "enhancement" since 2013 (iOS7) is just crap spaghetti on the wall experiments to try to invent something important.

PLUS...what really intensifies the issues here is another awful website design fad of the moment, namely, using tons of empty white space on a given page, with things so spread out that it requires constant scrolling & moving around to navigate and which is only exacerbated by the additional scrolling required by the whack-a-mole disappearing/reappearing/disappearing sticky header that blocks the text you're reading once you've found it within a lengthy oversized webpage full of too much wasted white space.

Solutions for non-existing problems that actually wind up causing more problems.

THAT is more reason why I hate sticky headers.

 

[Beachguy]

I agree!!! I have several sites I visit, and they all have headers about 1/3 of the way down the screen which is horrendously irritating.