I totally agree. It's a bad user experience mainly for these two reasons:
1. The draggable surface of the scrollbars is too small, and there is no real benefit to make it that thin in desktop browsers. Furthermore, the categories in the left panel are also draggable, so if the user wants to scroll but misses the scrollbar they will instead drag to reorder a category by mistake. I have accidently moved categories in this way 2-3 times already. I would sacrifice a little aesthetics in the name of usability by doubling the width of the scrollbars (or at least provide an option to have fat scrollbars). Another option is to make it harder to accidently reorder categories by reducing the draggable surface area of the categories (e.g., introduce drag handles, and only move when the drag handle is clicked upon).
2. In a normal windows model, you would click inside a panel to give it focus, and pressing PgUp/PgDn on a keyboard would scroll up/down on the panel that is in focus. However, in The Old Reader the right panel seems to always have the focus, so right now it is not possible to scroll the left panel by clicking inside it and pressing PgUp/PgDn. It would be great if you could provide proper panel focusing with a clear indication of which panel is in focus so that users would be able to quickly scroll through the panel using the keyboard (the urge to scroll using the keyboard would be lessened somewhat if the issue in #1 were to be resolved).
10basetom
I totally agree. It's a bad user experience mainly for these two reasons:
1. The draggable surface of the scrollbars is too small, and there is no real benefit to make it that thin in desktop browsers. Furthermore, the categories in the left panel are also draggable, so if the user wants to scroll but misses the scrollbar they will instead drag to reorder a category by mistake. I have accidently moved categories in this way 2-3 times already. I would sacrifice a little aesthetics in the name of usability by doubling the width of the scrollbars (or at least provide an option to have fat scrollbars). Another option is to make it harder to accidently reorder categories by reducing the draggable surface area of the categories (e.g., introduce drag handles, and only move when the drag handle is clicked upon).
2. In a normal windows model, you would click inside a panel to give it focus, and pressing PgUp/PgDn on a keyboard would scroll up/down on the panel that is in focus. However, in The Old Reader the right panel seems to always have the focus, so right now it is not possible to scroll the left panel by clicking inside it and pressing PgUp/PgDn. It would be great if you could provide proper panel focusing with a clear indication of which panel is in focus so that users would be able to quickly scroll through the panel using the keyboard (the urge to scroll using the keyboard would be lessened somewhat if the issue in #1 were to be resolved).