grumble grumble typical HN, top comment is whining about the webpage instead of focusing on the content. sigh
After clicking the link on my smartphone:
Sweet mother of Jesus, what have they done.
It actually was pretty straightforward on iOS Chrome mobile. On Desktop though -- WTF, users are supposed to eventually figure out how to activate the hidden menubar at the top? My first thought after mousewheeling to the giant IBM logo was that Chrome had crashed, because motion/interactivity had seemingly stopped so suddenly. Not since the Flash days have I seen a bespoke interactive web experience with such prominent navigation/UX confusion.
That said, when I figured out how to navigate, I enjoyed reading the narrative text, and I definitely plan on trying the font out in my next project.
Thankfully we use a far superior tool now :-)
Perhaps something along the lines: "Wow, look at that ugly page from Dropbox. My eyes hurt! Let's make ours even uglier!"
It's all about "Designer experience", not "User Experience" in this case (i.e. trying to be edgy for the sake of it, in order to impress your designer / PM peers)
I'm unsure to be honest.
I have tested on Firefox 59 and Chrome 65 in Linux.
This is fucking mental, seriously.
I didn't even spot this at first, a friend did.
Unfortunately it only works with the scroll wheel, or scroll events on a trackpad. It works finger-crampingly slow with my scroll wheel, about 15 full seconds of constant action, but I just found a laptop to try it on, and I think I finally got the effect they were going for with trackpad scroll effect. Much smoother and a neat effect. Spoiled a bit by my first, finger-cramping impression, but otherwise smooth enough that if I stumbled onto that experience first I might have thought nothing of it, or even been impressed.
Still see no reason for it not to responded to normal navigation keys.
_five months later_, I got a reply asking to explain further. I couldn't even remember what the bug was.
And that's it... there are many things in life more important than learning to navigate this one specific page.
It's also broken on my PC on Chrome, I need to scroll A LOT to advance the page...
It wasn't until I came to this thread I realized there was more, and I should look again, but even then it took me forever to:
1. Realize I needed to put my hand on my mouse, hover the tiny, thin red line to get it to expand, and then use that to navigate.
2. Flip between pgup/pgdn and arrow keys. Sometimes one set worked, sometimes another did, and it would flip at random points in the experience.
Why on earth would you selectively enable and disable the browser's interaction with common navigation keys repeatedly in the span of a single page? I can understand blocking/swallowing one set if you intend to use it somewhere for something else (i.e. the text input sections), but flipping them on and off with no other use for those keys while they are blocked? It boggles the mind.