The UX is terrible for me. If I have to do that much work to make the content show up, it breaks me out of the flow of reading and I do not absorb the material as well. I rapidly lost interest and did not finish the article. I applaud your experiment, and I imagine that there are people for whom it will be effective, but it is a mistake to imagine that any single form of presentation can be "in fact great" in an objective way that works for everyone.

I see your point and I agree. You seem to be an experienced reader with an interest in history. History Lapse is meant towards the uninitiated youth who lost interest in history because it is "boring". You can read more about it in our whitepaper here https://en.historylapse.org/whitepaper. In this context of operation I maintain my opinion that the UX solution is great.

Thank you for explaining the context. I appreciate your willingness to engage here. Your characterization of my perspective is correct. I had not heard of your project before encountering this link, and if I've got a moment later I'd be happy to read your paper and find out more about what you are doing.

[after reading: this is a great project and I deeply appreciate the amount of thought that went into its design. It would have been nice if there were some way to bring more of that awareness into the initial reading experience, instead of just dropping us into something unfamiliar and confusing, but that's a limitation of the hackernews interface and I'm not sure what you could have done about it other than show up and explain as you are doing here. Keep up the good work!]

I would add an overlay to the images prompting people to mouse over for more text, and then hide it once they have done it once. It lacks discoverability as it is currently.

i think an overlay for the first image would do. will implement.

I didn't even notice that there was mouseover text for any of the images after reading the entire thing, so this would be greatly appreciated.

Also appreciated would be a way to expose every image's text at once, for those of us who don't use our mice to read. (like the mobile layout)

Other than the mouse over issue, I love the format of the site. Very readable, and it greatly expanded my understanding of the war.

Is this serious and is this account seriously History Lapses?

yes, I am the creator of History Lapse. why so suspicious?

Because your response to criticism sounded, frankly, like a petulant teenager. It's hard to square that with the quality of the writing in the article.

Thank you for recognizing the quality of the article. The "UX is great" response was more of an answer on the same level as "UX is terrible": it did not provide any explanation on why it is terrible and it seemed to be a quick judgement. History Lapse is meant towards the uninitiated youth and not the avid reader. You can read more about it in our whitepaper here https://en.historylapse.org/whitepaper

probably because that was such a needlessly snarky reply.

it really is terrible

please explain

Great response to user feedback!

History Lapse is meant to be read in cadence with the bits of text. The association is meant to stay in memory for a longer time since it is the natural way our brain works. Also, there is almost no reading fatigue because of the start-stop UX.

People are used to scrolling up-down, not moving mouse around in zig-zag.

I prefer this js hack[0] which shows everything and after mouseover it allows to hide text for better image viewing.

But content and quality of texts are great!

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19495172

"You're holding it wrong."