Oh dear. This is a good example of something that should have been more extensively tested before putting it out into the real world. It feels like something that worked on the developers' computers but for me the frustrating scrolling experience and the way it handles history made me close the tab rather quickly.
Just because something is "all the rage" - like this kind of scrolling implementation - doesn't mean that it's actually good for your users. And if you are going to implement a potentially frustrating feature like this, at least make sure you've tested it to within an inch of its life.
Edit: a lot of my problems with this site were caused by Chrome's "translation" bar popping up on every page transition, which was interfering with the scrolling.
But I agree about the scrolling. Even on an ipad, which I think is the standard device these days, the scrolling is broken at times. Sometimes I swipe up and a new page scrolls in. Ok. Sometimes I swipe up and some content scrolls in from the side. Ok. But sometimes I swipe up and nothing happens. Thats a bit confusing.
>Even on an ipad, which I think is the standard device these days
I would want to see some statistics there. A quick google search yields the following article from last year, which states that the PC is still the majority ahead of any type of mobile device, let alone the ipad as a subset of mobile devices.
You might be right. The traffic share of ipads is in the one digit range. I just looked at the stats of a high traffic website. The ipad accounts for 5% of the traffic.
However, when I want to look at a website to see how the designer planned it, I always grasp my ipad and look at it.
Because even if he planned it for Chrome on the desktop (which accounts for 50% on that website) I dont know the OS, the resolution, if he thoguht about a keyboard, a mousewheel, a mouse grasping the scroolbar or the trackpad of a notebook having a scroll area.
But yeah, the world of devices is pretty fragmented. Looking at an ipad doesn't mean too much.
Barely worked for me on Mobile. My phone is mid-tier, nothing spectacular, but a Museum info page shouldn't be that demanding. It also was not formatted correctly, a lot of the objects covered text, or text extended off of my phone's screen. But when I tried to scroll to see more, I was moved to the next page.
Seems like this would be ideal for a mobile experience, the museum could have the URL within the exhibits (or a QR code, etc) and you could swipe through the information while in the actual Museum. But I guess currently it's just a nice desktop browser tech demo.
As for the desktop experience, I like the idea of arrow buttons on the side of the screen to cycle through the pages. Because it just feels so strange to scroll the mousewheel and not have the page respond with 1-to-1 movements matching the wheel (and also the latency is a killer). But the arrows just jumps through pages, and not changing content in the page, so you'll miss out on things if you click instead of scroll. Pressing the up arrow to go back to a previous page will not take you to the "start" of that page, but instead the last "scroll" of content.
When using the scroll wheel instead of the arrows, it doesn't actually do anything about half the time. And several times it just stopped entirely, requiring me to refresh the page to allow it to scroll again. This is on Chrome/Win7.
I just don't get why people continue doing this. This isn't scrolling, so don't use the scroll wheel. The buttons are a great idea, but they didn't implement them well.
Also: I don't maximize browser windows so I can see two things side by side, so my browser is probably 800 px across, this means that for this website (and an increasing number of other websites such as noexcuselist.com) I get the mobile version. Thanks responsive design!
Exactly. Especially also since people who visit museums (even the awesome Van Gogh museum) tend to be older, and older people tend to have older browsers.
Just backing away from sites like this is a pain. After scolling down few pages, I need to click back button way too many times just to get back to HN.
Yes, it's not 100% optimal. That said, it's trying to tell a story and does so quite effectively using the way most people navigate on page content, using the scroll wheel.
The way the page has been coded (using anchors) rather than by figuring out which part to display using the scroll wheel directly could be improved.
But form-over-function seems to be all the rage on the web (contrast to say 1995 when this page would have been a much simpler affair without all the eye candy), even if I don't like it. Try looking at the paintings too instead of just being irritated by the scrolling and back button issues.
Actually, I didn't even realize the scroll wheel worked, and instead was using the arrow navigation on the right. I typically only assume the scroll wheel works when I see a visual cue such as a scroll bar on the right.
And even using the arrow navigation, the experience seems broken, as it wasn't flying in the art until after I clicked down to the next section. I would see the art flying in, but it was too late, as it was moving down to the next section.
On a macbook on Chrome here, can't scroll and the screen keeps bumping up and down on its own. I think the "translate?" bar is trying to come down then the web site must have some Javascript or something that fights it.
I seem to be one of the few here who actually enjoyed the experience while scrolling. Using back was broken, as it didn't scroll back up, but it was a pleasantly presented page.
Which teams are those? I'm very impressed at the result, especially coming from a museum. Almost made me wonder if Google Art Institute had made the website.
As an aside: I'm from Auvers-sur-Oise, the place where Van Gogh spent his last 2 months and is buried :)
On the contrary, I just visited in June and it was a miserable experience. 2/3 of the museum was closed and the part that was open was packed full despite the rather strict entrance timing that they seemed to be using. The story of his life as told through pictures was interesting, but we were in and out in an hour. Kind of a bummer after hearing all the hype.
As someone who works in the cultural sector, and has seen a million terrible arts/museum/heritage sites, I quite like it.
Yes, it has flaws - and not just the scrolling - stuff like having links rendered without underlining and in the same colour as body text.
But I could find the location, opening hours, and ticket booking link almost instantly, which is what 99 out of 100 of people visiting that site will want. It's well-designed from that point of view.
Very frustrating to navigate with click and scroll. Clicking on the black box in the upper right hand corner while using English reverts back to Dutch.
Personally I wished all those tourists that can't wait to get 'schroomed out of their minds' stayed at home but making drug use illegal for tourists and legal for the locals would be a legal and practical impossibility. They tried doing that in some places, all it led to was enterprising locals becoming either small time dealers or renting out their services to tourists.
Supply and demand. With drugs as long as it isn't legal everywhere I guess we'll continue to see this pattern.
Hope you enjoyed the museum, even in that state of mind, van Gogh was an amazing artist (and a substance abuser himself...).
Eindhoven and Utrecht are not touristy cities. However they do have large "non-local" populations (expats in the first case, students in the second) so perhaps your point still stands that it is not the locals regularly consuming.
I know plenty of dutch people (in the thousands) but know only very few that are substance abusers. I know tons of people visiting NL too (mostly because I don't mind showing people around and I'm in online contact with quite a few people as well) and only a very small number of them don't mention the fact that drugs are legal and that this is one of their drivers for going there.
Especially in the 18-35 bracket, above that it gets a bit less wild (naturally).
All the university cities have a relatively high proportion of substance abuse and quite a lot of that will be locals in the student age bracket.
But when comparing locals to tourists the tourists definitely make up a disproportionally large chunk of the drug users. And not all of them come for a few days, quite a few people move to NL permanently because of the lax drugs laws and end up in the social care system.
It's sad because really nobody wins there and there are no easy solutions. Re-criminalizing drugs will be followed by a significant increase in crime and the Dutch ability to influence the countries around them to adopt similar legislation is without any chance of succeeding.
Live around Amsterdam long enough and you too will become an expert at spotting junkies. As for the habits of my thousands of acquitances because use is legal people are pretty open about it here if they use soft drugs.
The few people that I know that are into harder drugs would not advertise that too openly but if there were no downsides to hard drug abuse that you can spot relatively easily if the consumption lasts for longer than a trial period then I don't think we'd have hard drug legislation to begin with.
In America for instance people would be a lots more circumspect about their drug use (but those barriers evaporate as soon as they set foot on Dutch soil and it is party time).
It didn't seem like you were talking about "junkies" when you brought up substance abuse in the context of a tourist eating mushrooms and visiting a museum. And you say that many university students engage in substance abuse; that also makes me wonder about your definition of the term, because in my experience, while university life involves quite a lot of alcohol, I haven't heard of that many students whom I would consider "substance abusers."
Substance abuse to me is defined as consuming any drug to such a level that it interferes with your normal life.
Tourists visiting cities simply because of the novelty factor of drugs being legal and then partaking in this out of curiosity are simply stupid, not addicts (they are stupid because they are not in any way positioned to know what they are buying and this results in quite a few trips to the ER each year).
But drug addiction does exist and the number of foreigners that end up in Dutch rehab programs and or shelters is huge.
It's even got a name here: drugs tourism.
Alcohol can be abused just like any other drug (and in fact, is probably the most commonly abused drug).
They are stupid because they don't have a supplier that they can trust nor do they have the information to distinguish the 'real' stuff from stuff that will make them simply ill or even (rare, fortunately) kill them.
The fact that it is decriminalized does not mean that people won't be trying to take advantage of you.
Buying drugs is not quite buying a bottle of Sprite, it typically does not come in a container with a brand name on it and as a tourist you won't be hanging around long enough to work out which connections you can trust and which to stay away from. The person selling it to you just wants your money, once. For a repeat buyer the risks would go down considerably.
Feel free to ignore any and all of the above. We're off-topic far enough as far as I'm concerned, if you feel that buying drugs abroad in one-off cash transactions does not carry significant risk then I'm perfectly ok with that.
Many national brands have some kind of inspection behind them - UL listed, or FDA approved. I'm wondering what a 'brand' printed on a laser printer in somebody's garage is worth, in terms of product safety.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. But it seems weird to suggest that any non-local buying psychedelic truffles in a smartshop is "stupid" because they shouldn't trust the brand. I don't really see how it has anything to do with whether you're local or a tourist.
Just because something is "all the rage" - like this kind of scrolling implementation - doesn't mean that it's actually good for your users. And if you are going to implement a potentially frustrating feature like this, at least make sure you've tested it to within an inch of its life.
Edit: a lot of my problems with this site were caused by Chrome's "translation" bar popping up on every page transition, which was interfering with the scrolling.