This problem also can show up for people who scroll with a mouse wheel or trackpad gesture, and so do not have to have the cursor over a scroll bar to scroll. My cursor is usually near where I last clicked on the page, and it is annoying when I then scroll and things start popping in and out of existance as they scroll under the cursor.<p>I find it annoying to have to go find a safe spot to park after I click on something so I can scroll without triggering things.
This trend might've come from existing desktop UIs with clickable elements that didn't show any obvious signs of being clickable - I believe XP's visual style was the first to have subtly changing buttons on mouseover, and that spread over to web design. Then maybe someone thought it wasn't <i>obvious</i> enough, so they made mouseover changes even more obvious and attention-getting, to the point of being distracting.<p>I find that a lot of web designs considered "modern" now are certainly excellent at being attention-getting and flashy, but have much lower information content and usability -- it's the equivalent of someone screaming in your face, and more loudly than before. It might be a reflection of lowered attention spans in general, or a contributor to it; I don't know.<p>I would hope that the cursor changing from an arrow to a pointer hand is obvious enough that something is clickable...
Downvoting a well-asked stackoverflow question out of dislike for the design of the website the asker was building seems unduly harsh, especially as the author hasn't actually even seen the website.
Totally agree. It's been bothering me for a while too- I never fully realized it was because I would generally guide my mouse towards it as I'm looking at it.
A company I really like has this problem. [1] When I think of getting a new film pack, I find myself doing a "mouse dance" where I look at the photos and then they disappear followed by moving the mouse over another photo.<p>[1] <a href="http://vsco.co/film" rel="nofollow">http://vsco.co/film</a>
Here's the thing, big affordances are good UI, so making the entire image a click target is a good idea. _Especially_ because of mobile. On mobile, nobody is dragging a cursor anywhere. The mobile market is more important for designers than the small demographic that uses a mouse wrong.