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 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.