It is common and intuitive, but the one thing that is unique is it is pretty much full frame. It is normally used on an image within the layout of the website. It took me a second to find the handle knowing it'd be there, but the sheer devastation kept my eye from finding it. The GP did not say it took them 20 minutes to find the handle obscure, but it does kind of get lost in the carnage.

Please. No animations. Just provide a tooltip suggests it can be dragged and clear it on drag. Or something subtle like that.

Some people like animations. Some people like tooltips. Some people like figuring out the UI without instruction.

Different people prefer different things and there is no objective right answer.

> there is no objective right answer.

If we're talking about UI/UX then there kinda is.

It's the UI that the largest proportion of your target audience would find intuitive if they tried it.

So it's not the lack of an objective answer that's the problem, it's the difficulty of finding a proxy for your target audience and a testing process you can afford.

Sometimes the proxy is "you" and the testing is "your experience and intuition" and sometimes the proxy is a statistically significant number of formal user tests.

tooltips don't really work on touch interfaces

Nope, I was the same. I spent a good while wondering why the comparison images look like they are of different areas - and only then realized that you can use the middle bar to move, it was very obscure.

I see triangles pointing left and right next to the thick part of the bar.

Those, for me, are strong indicators of draggability.

...contrary to sibling replies, I agree with you: I knew what it was going to be before even clicking.

Here is an example of a demo we released that uses a tooltip to make it more obvious how it works:

https://hific.github.io/

Another solution could be to make the date labels at the top look and act like buttons. Then you could still use the UI by clicking on the dates without having to understand the scrubber.

> I would improve it for new users by having a little animation after load that "wiggles" the handle a bit to get the user's attention.

Please don't. It's just one more reason to apply Kill Sticky.

What? What does their suggestion have to do with Kill Sticky?

Kill Sticky kills tons of animations, many unexpectedly.

Ultimately, modern animations are just as distracting as animated Gifs were. They're somewhere between an ideal reading experience and wholly unwanted autoplay videos.

If autoplay videos are a swarm of angry hornets, animations are summertime gnats. We live with them but they're hardly something we asked for.

... ok?

I mean the animation suggested would be over before most people could react, a couple of millimeters of movement To show it can move and that's it.

You'd think so but how many of those forever looping animations actually need to run for more than a second - any?

Tone deaf web design earns my skepticism, pretty much non-stop. I guess it's statically possible he'd be the exception.