SAC Design Tip: Hinting users to the table (widget) scroll bars

[su01]

Most of the times I show a story to others, they get confused by the design of SAC.

Today: When you display a table in Analytics Cloud, you have that almost invisible scoll bar with a grey slider box (please compare screenshot below). The bar only appears when focus is set to the table and disappears when focus moves to another control.

I believe designers wanted to help reduce the clutter and have the design in accordance with todays "flat rectangular" style.

But the result in the actual customer experience is, in this case for the scrollbars, always the question "where is the slider" or "how can I scroll that table"? The problem gets worse when the tables right edge is close to the right edge of the browsers viewport, resulting in multiple unidentifiable and especially hard to distinguish greyish rectangles.

So when designing stories and training users, I feel a strong urge to serve new and non-regular SAC users with some guidance on the UI.

Add a text box on the top right corner of your table like this:

I could imagine, working not in Story but Application design mode, the option to show/hide such user assistance could be handled by scripting. So a suggestion is: Provide your users with an option to show help. This could not only be done for simple tasks like getting familiar with SAC UI but also for hints on the data or a link to otherwise hidden validation views providing record level detail data or statistics or lists of information on the presented data like document types included in the base data.

Here is the text for your copy paste convenience:

Tables vertical scroll bar here 🔻

 

Same can be done for the horizontal scoll bar.
On Windows 10 you can use [WIN]+[.] to quickly open an Emoji Dialog.
Heres some additional pointing Symbols already: ➡⬅⬆⬇👆👇👉👈←→↑↓⇧⇩⇨⇦◀▶▲▼

 

By the way, in this case I made the tables viewport a bit larger to the right and highlighted the empty far right column in another filling grey tone to strengthen the message. However, table formatting is not much fun in SAC and this works only for tables fitting the screen. Another Idea could be to paint a box in the background to visually hint the user to the area beaing a place to watch for a slider.

Please share your opinions, ideas and further examples on how to handle the pitfalls of SAC.