http://worrydream.com was a horrible experience for me. Between the extremely slow scroll-hijacking and disabling of my vim-based scroll events it was a nightmare to try to navigate and I gave up without actually viewing any of the projects. Even using my colleagues hyper scroll wheel gave us a brief chuckle before quitting the page entirely.

Funny enough my first experience with worrydream was without JS, as with most new websites. And it's much better then.

:) I loved it when I first looked at it, but it vandalized itself when I turned JavaScript on.

me three. I went there and saw a basic resume. thought, ok. whatever. then i saw the comments about turning javascript on. the horror

haha same here ;)

Holy smokes, that was atrocious. I have no idea what was causing me to flip to different slides, if I'm even getting that terminology correct. But it was just magically happening. I didn't get very far. I think I had to re-navigate to the "bio" page about six times before I gave up.

Perhaps you should start a startup that lists sites friendly for vim-based scroll events.

He didn't argue his point well by bringing up vim, but he does have a point. It loaded very slowly and isn't designed that well.

In general, WWW content should be designed browser/user/agent agnostic way. Better not to assume that everyone is using touch or a mouse to scroll around. Hence, it's not the greatest design.

Am I missing some sort of joke here? These are exactly the types of pages that I would recommend avoiding.

If your're hoping to convince employers of your technical skills I would put examples of your work up front. Unless you're applying for jobs where "unique" UIs are valued (designing ad agency sites?) then it will actually detract from your goal.

This. In addition, the readability is straight-up bad on many of these.

Everyone is going nuts about the presentation/scrolling/UI of worrydream, but they are missing out on the goldmine of what he's actually been working on: http://worrydream.com/#!/Showreel2012

Its absolutely insane someone could be that productive in 2 years. A lot of the ideas in that showreel are incredible. Yeah many of them probably don't work, but I saw dozens of new interactions that don't exist anywhere else. Plus the demo is >4 years old. That's amazing.

His CV has the following quote: “One of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today.” — Alan Kay

People are obsessed with getting immediate gratification and have little to no attention span these days.

It's not a demand for instant gratification so much as a demand for functional websites. The page was so weighed down by javascript bloat that it lagged on my phone when trying to scroll. I gave up in disgust and never made it to the allegedly-awesome showreel.

I'd certainly never hire that guy based on my first impression, which is that he doesn't value performant code.

Honestly, this guy is a genius. And people can't get over that their scroll wheel doesn't work on a website that hasn't been updated in half a decade.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

That's the point.

If a genius can't make a tricky personal website without breaking things, what chance do normal people have?

Just make a normal website.

Brett Victor is awesome. If you copy his website, you're learning exactly the wrong lessons from him.

In the context of a showcase website, first impressions matter. You want the work to be front and center. Not the fact that you can't design a usable website.

To a degree. Sometimes it's OK for the user to have to put a modicum of effort in, especially for something which is not a product or service.

Where "a modicum of effort" is have a specific type of machine?

The thing that got to me about how amazing his website was is how many of his sites I've actually seen, used and been impressed with that were all built by him.

I also honestly can't say I've faced the usage issues other people have. It was a pleasure to look through a bunch of his stuff and I actually kept on looking for fun.

The first one you linked messes up with my scrolling and makes is incredibly slow, I have to use the thin scrollbar on the rights side due to that...

It was terrible under Firefox on my Surface Book, so out of curiosity I then tried it on Edge: scrolling doesn’t work at all on the touchpad or touchscreen (the arrow keys, Space, Shift+Space, Home and End don’t work in any browser). The scrollbar is the only thing that allows you to navigate down the page.

Disabling JavaScript (or if you are a NoScript user) usually 'fixes' the scroll override annoyances but try going to about:config and toggling layout.css.scroll-behavior.enabled to 'false' as well.

I started noticing some sites were hijacking scroll despite having them blocked by NoScript, however the above config change fixed that instantly. Turns out scroll can be hijacked by CSS now, not just JavaScript. Progress!

Nice. Unfortunately, that configuration option doesn't exist in Pale Moon.

Did you mean worrydream or my personal website? If you mean mine, sorry for the scroll-jacking! It's been a few years since I've touched the input handling code and that kind of stuff tends to rust really fast. Might have to go back in there.

Talking about worrydream.com

Yeah, I'm in Chrome on Windows and a full spin of the scroll wheel moves it down about 5 pixels.

Given how much thought he puts into user experience in his projects, that's really weird. I have to scroll with click and drag and sort of "throw" the page upward as if I'm using a touchscreen.

In Swedish there is an expression "The smith's horse and the shoemakers children are worst shod" that comes to mind.

It's kind of when fashion designers wears an ill fitting t-shirt and jeans I guess.

That is really weird. I'm using Chrome on Windows too, and my scroll wheel works normally on the site. I wonder what is causing the different behaviors we're seeing.

It works sorta-fine in Firefox. I say "sorta" because it overrides the browser's smooth scrolling to move in jerky steps on every click of the wheel, but at least it moves useably fast.

To hazard a guess, the testing environment was a Mac with trackpad scrolling. Each scrolling step on that would be small enough that "teleport to next scroll position" looks smooth, and breaking the built-in smooth scrolling wouldn't be noticeable.

I do wish people would stop trying to reimplement scrolling and just let the OS/browser do it...

FWIW I'm in Chrome 54 on Windows 7.

On my iPhone it works perfectly.

Same, I think it's on purpose.

Why would someone purposefully make navigation of their site significantly worse than the default?

I've seen slower scrolling done to improve the "mouth feel" of the website. It's usually a designer wanting to do it without considering the full ramifications of their whimsy.

Did anyone bumped into the easter egg on his site? If not, try to click on the "purveyor of impossible dreams" text below his name/logo thingie (and keep clicking!)

PS: If you are patient enough to wait for 45 clicks, you will bump into the second easter egg ;-)

WRT your website, it's quite nice of you that you've added the message "you need js for this website". Maybe better if you add a little personal information to that message too, like "Hey I'm Doug, I'm a software dev, and this is my website. You need JS enabled for it to function. Otherwise reach me at <mail <at> domain>." This'd be more intriguing to enable JS. And when I enabled it I liked what I got, a nice idea.

WRT Bret's website, it's the type of website I'd pass if I wasn't told that there's sth. interesting in it. A black window w/o JS, and when enabled, it takes 5-10 seconds to just show me some text b/c needs to load custom fonts and loads of JS, and then messes up my scroll. Yours is a creative thing and I like it, but this one just imitates badly the normal scolling. Plain awful.

Hey thanks, really nice focused feedback there that I will take action on. A pipe dream I have is to actually make the engine powering my website work without JS as well. So a zoom/swipe navigation would actually go up to the server to get a fresh static html page that would render all the cells at their appropriate location/size. Kind of like how the very first map apps worked online. It would be a little clunky obviously but I think still usable.

I had no idea Bret's website would be so polarizing! I appreciate it in a more idealized sense, so "assuming JS is enabled and scrolling works right and you have a fast internet", and of course for the content itself. If he was the kind of person that had to look for jobs then I'd recommend fixing those things as well.

I guess who don't have JS in these days are mostly the ones who disabled it in purpose. So a message inviting them to enable would be enough. Also, it's harder for some handicapped people to use interactive websites, so they'd rather have a nice plain alternative than an imitation of the interactive site that's equally harder to use. And, you're welcome :)

Bret's website is an obstacle to the content therewithin. If all he cares is getting hired, then well... But if it's sharing information, he should fix that website.

I like your concept, but zoomed out the layout kinda reminds me of a swastika with more arms.

Ha! I was going for spiral galaxy, but now you've got me wondering about all those job applications that I never heard back from!

FWIW the engine (https://github.com/dougkoellmer/swarm) that runs the website doesn't care what the layout of the cells are. For example here's a prototype textbook reader: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/

Yeah the accidental swastika needs to go. Even though everyone knows it's not a swastika, the emotional reference is formed before logic takes over.

The emotional reference needs to go. Swastikas were around long before nazis and they'll be around long after. It's a pretty fundamental shape.

I totally thought it was going to be a swastika before I got zoomed out all the way

+1 for worrydream.com. I don't mind the scrolling, once you're in a post it's fine. It's an experiment in UX after all.

This is the best one I've read: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange

The visualisations and interactions are really helpful in aiding understanding. It's nice to see people trying out new ways of presenting information.

My corporate firewall has your domain name on a shitlist, for the stated reason of distributing viruses and malware. Have you been told this before?

Could you give me any more information? My original site (years and years ago) was a PHP monster that got hacked briefly through a security vulnerability in my hosting provider (wasn't my fault, I swear!), so maybe the corporate firewall just has a long memory?

I'll try to get more info when I get time. I'm not really sure what software my place uses for blocking sites. Here's one message I get: "This page has been blocked by the PaloAlto URL filtering device." -- and then it tells me the site is contained in a "malware" category.

I thought worrydream was very nice and I could see why it was being upvoted.

Then I enabled JS, and it completely breaks scrolling and loads a ton of images :|

Highlighting worrydream (I think) was less about the site, and more about the site content. Bret Victor has dedicated an incredible amount of time to writing about design [1], visualization[2], reality[3], climate change[4], among other things.

1. http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

2. http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction

3. https://vimeo.com/115154289

4. http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange

How could you possibly list worrydream.com when it completely breaks the scroll wheel?

Because one issue does not negate an enormous treasure trove of content

Wow, your site has the most original interface I've ever seen. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly leaves an impression.

Your first demo link [1] to Swarm on your resume is broken for me.

[1]: http://www.b33hive.net/

Bah yea need to update that, thanks for the heads up.

After looking at worrydream.com, everything seems little bit tilted now.

Whoa that spiral layout/zoom one is really sweet. Neat idea!

Man, downloading all the images on worrydream.com takes me 5 full seconds, and I have a 50 megabit line.

trying to scroll is horrible

I don't find worry dream to be aesthetically pleasing.

The scrolling is sooooooooooo choppy.

This is not a civil comment. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html