Oh geez. I didn't even know you could scroll down. I played around for a bit, thought "ok what's the point of this?" and just moved on.

I blame the trend in UI design to hide scroll bars. On desktop they're perfectly visible and it's not so difficult to work out that you need to scroll.

In Chrome on OS X I'm seeing a scroll bar always visible on the I/O page.

Same for Firefox on Windows

The first slide is to blame, not the overall design. I scrolled from the get-go, but that's because I didn't engage with the "play" button on the first slide which seems like the only thing they want you to do. If there were no way to interact with something in that first slide, you'd scroll.

What the ... I didn't realize that till I read this post of yours even after playing all those clicking games. I thought since it's far away, may be they only have these animations here and someone shared it only because of them.

In all honesty I did scroll but didn't realise it was interactive until reading your comment, bewildered reading about Higgs and planets

I hate that I have to scroll at all to read a couple hundred words at most, let alone scroll five freakin' times on a 1080 display.

Edit: And why in the world am I getting the webcam indicator on this site‽

No idea you could scroll down either, I just closed the tab and moved on.

I'm glad I checked the comments here... This design doesn't make sense.

Also, the page wants to use my microphone, did anyone try to speak to it?

It fuddles some of the animation sequences at the top of the page. The spinning satellite changes direction on a sound, for example.

If you were attentive, you could notice "continue to site" arrow on the very first screen.

If your UI requires that users "be attentive" just to discover the content you're trying to convey, then your UI is awful and the user's failure to see it is entirely your fault.

Well said. I blame it partially on designer groupthink.

Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.

Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.

Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."

(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")

That's not actually what "groupthink" means, so you aren't really disagreeing.

It's very light gray text on a white background, with a very thin line weight, and it disappears as soon as you start interacting with the page.

And that link just jumps you another animation, where you would then be as stuck as in the first place, with no more guidance link.

Actually I just realized I could scroll with your comment!

It used to be much worse with flashy microsites. You'd open them and wait minutes for the first page to load. Then click somewhere and wait again. And the UIs would be much more confusing. Scrollwheel would be disabled.

This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.

Wow, I just did the same thing. I actually wouldn't have scrolled down if it wasn't for your comment.

That’s a shame because selfishly I want everyone to see the second slide which is of the Racer game we unveiled at last year’s I/O. Was a proud moment for us code-play folk ;) http://www.chrome.com/racer

It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/

Slightly OT, but how could you tell it was a higgs? What was the icosahedron representing?

I am starting to see a pattern of subtle hints about the demos this year.

When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.

I just rage quited because of this loop...