Remember Tyler Hall’s personal story of a UX moment where the popup sharing context menu on iOS had no visible indication that the content inside was scrollable? The thing his mom wanted to do seemed impossible because it was out of view. iOS isn’t alone here — Terence Eden documents essentially the same problem on Android:
I tried sharing a website using Google Chrome for Android. I hit the share button, and a panel popped-up from the bottom of the screen.
Hmmm. It didn’t have the share destination that I wanted. It was early in the morning – when I’m not at my cognitive best – and I was stumped. There is nothing on this screen – other than the icons – to tell me how I can interact with it. There’s no scrollbar, no handle, no “more” icon, nothing.
I would think even just fairly subtle “scroll shadows” would go a long way in both cases, but some serious user testing should be in order here.
iOS screenshot: the cut-off icons on the right edge make it clear to me that i need to swipe horizontally to reveal more items
Yup, it’s pretty obvious that you can swipe by seeing the cut off icon
BUT that depends on the width of the screen being enough that you can see the icon cut off like that.
If the width is exactly, say, 5 * (iconwidth+padding), then you’re in the original situation: nothing looks like there’s more to the right to scroll to.
The UX rule is pretty simple, and TV apps handle it just fine: if there’s more off the screen, put a > button near the edge to help facilitate or indicate scrolling.
While the partially shown icons make it clear that you can scroll horizontally in iOS, the original issue was that the design doesn’t show that you can also scroll vertically in the context menu.
There are more options to be found below “Copy”in the iOS example.