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Les Orchard

I beg of you, web site designers, just let me scroll through a page and stop trying to make my scroll-wheel the hand-crank of your obnoxious hurdy-gurdy of a marketing presentation

41 comments
Les Orchard

This is the latest example, a page for the new Orox bike from Tern.

I like their cargo e-bikes. I'd like to flick through this page to get a sense for the new one. Instead I get this janky jerky twee slide show where I can't figure out how to stop on any particular bit of info without getting stuck halfway through a transition.

ternbicycles.com/en/bikes/471/

Les Orchard

Oh! And what's worse: Trying to scrub through this page by grabbing the scroll bar with my mouse, I also realized there's periodically a navigable carousel of stuff to stop and click through.

So, while they're doing all these fancy slide-wipes and stutter-stop animations in reaction to my scrolling - the actual info I want to see is hidden behind next / previous arrows I have to stop and click on. Crimony, this is awful

Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸

@lmorchard I absolutely loathe that kind of UI too, but just as often if not more, the fault lays with the CEOs. They're so easily distracted by shiny garbage and all it takes for one competitor to do something flashy and tacky for all of them to follow suit and if you dare tell them that it's not a good idea, they'll shove you out the door before you can finish speaking.

Les Orchard

@sysop408 It's annoying me because I'm like, I need a Reader Mode for this brochure - and then I'm like what am I doing with my life

Sampath Pāṇini ®

@sysop408 @lmorchard
…cuz the execs don’t use the site. This what happens when design and product people get muted.

IvanTheBlue

@sysop408 @lmorchard
That's why I agree to do it then come back two days later with some techno-babble as to why we can't do it unless we completely rebuild the site or something

Jernej Simončič �

@lmorchard I tried Reader Mode in Vivaldi, and the site somehow manages to break that (using the scroll wheel rubberbands to the top of the page, though dragging the scrollbar does work).

Nicole Parsons

@lmorchard

I've resorted to selecting all the text & copy/paste it into a text-only notes application, just so I can read the article without the sensory equivalent of strobe lights flashing on and off.

Shutting off javascript in the browser sometimes helps too.

evenreven

@lmorchard They're not just obnoxious, but it's so rare they even work. I have a recent mid-level Android phone, and on Vivaldi/Chromium this janks along so badly I needed some time to notice that scrolling did anything at all. If I, as a developer, showed this to my boss and said it was ready to launch, I would probably get fired, deservedly.

Tim Lavoie

@lmorchard That is obnoxious. Pretty sweet bike though!

Robotistry

@lmorchard I especially loathe the way my one single action "scroll" turns into "flip to next image down" and then into "flip sideways" and then "jump to image" and then "make something move in the opposite direction from the direction I'm scrolling" and then "zoom out".

It's like someone said "Here's a box of effects. You have to use all of them at least once. Make it easy for me to grade."

Richard Hendricks

@lmorchard @randomgeek SaaS I could pay a nickel to use - take one of this ridiculous websites and add the music to it as you scroll down!

catraxx

@lmorchard It's unfortunately something customers often request.

Les Orchard

@catraxx Yeah, I used to work on marketing web sites and remember awful dumb clients :blobsadleft: Wish I could tell their client as a customer that this is ass

catraxx

@lmorchard Yeah. If i had any say in the matter, i'd do none of that. I like simple, static websites.

Faye

@lmorchard This was neat in 2010 when it was novel and done with purpose. Now it's only annoying.

Kay Ohtie

@lmorchard I have seen like, a tiny handful where it was genuinely cool and actually implemented properly, and none of them were for marketing. That tiny handful is also a mere tiny handful of the total number of these abominations I've seen and wanted to throw out a window because they didn't work on my phone properly or some other bullshit besides wasting my time. @compufox

TeflonTrout

@lmorchard I asked for a link to a product brochure because I'm in the market for a killer bike, and they said "There's one on each bike's page."

...I know. That's the whole fucking problem.

deadly lazer

@lmorchard what ever happened to a good plain HTML page with clear pictures taken on a Sony CD Mavica. That's gonna sell me on whatever it is even if i don't need it. This nightmare? Never in a million years no matter how good the product is.

c0debabe, sleepy raccoon

@lmorchard

hello

front end person here

I beg them not to

But marketing and management apparently need animations and special effects or business isn't actually happening 😭

Les Orchard

@c0debabe I used to do this sort of thing for a living in Flash and Shockwave and ughhhhh yeah. Glad not to have worked with these sorts of clients for a long while

Alex

@lmorchard Not our fault. It's always a management decision.

Andrew Conn

@lmorchard This usability nightmare is called “Scrolljacking”. Here is an article from NNG … nngroup.com/articles/scrolljac

Automotive Cult Antagonist

@lmorchard this and every restaurant website.

I want a static page with their hours, location, and menu. I don’t need 8k UHD images of pasta.

Florian Egermann

@lmorchard the macromedia flash intro is laughing from the grave

Malcolm Herbert

@lmorchard am stealing this phrase, despite the fact that I do enjoy the hurdy-gurdy on occasion ... :)

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