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I couldn’t disagree with you more except the complaining usually takes over the HN thread.

It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content.

“Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. How can the user “Chill out” if the browser comes to a crawl, phone heats up and is confused about what is going on.

Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”.

> It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content.

My whole point was that "decoration" can be enjoyable.

> “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. You haven’t put forth a compelling argument besides taking an anti-cliche stance.

You're assuming all users have this stance, and that's what's actually condescending and out of touch to me. You haven't really put forward any compelling argument that doesn't fit my description of HN users assuming what they are looking for in a website is in any way representative of what the average user wants. It's the same thing as the tech crowd getting shouting at phone manufacturers because they're removing the headphone jack: surprise surprise, the average user doesn't care enough about plugging in an adapter that they won't buy the phone.

> Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”.

Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software. This is part of Google's "Arts Experiments". It's _meant_ to be pretty and flashy.

I am not assuming.

I spent several years working in A/B testing. Based on behavior, none of the artistic branding made any difference to whether users got engaged in sites. Make the site fast. Put your action items in prominent places on the page. Make them big and obvious. Make the site usable. Make it easy for people to get to what they want. Those things mattered again and again. But pretty aesthetics? Never once have I seen it matter.

Want to piss off a designer? Subject the designs to an A/B test. Want to really piss off a designer? Show the resulting null result to the designer afterwards.

As far as I am concerned, anyone focused on the look and feel of webpages serves the purpose of making the people who own and run the site happy. If they talk about what the users want, I have to ask what testing they have done with actual users. If they can't produce tests, then I conclude that they are spouting BS.

If this does not sound possible to you, I would suggest that you explain the enduring popularity of minimalist websites like craigslist, plentyoffish and google.

I think we are both arguing in a healthy manner - I realized and I edited my post.

Continuing: “Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software.” - I feel like we should separate presentation from art. There are exceptions such as experiential art, performance art, where presentation is the art.

Just the way cover flow gets in the way of enjoying music, animated websites get in the way of the content (the experiment). Experiment is fine, its presentation is flawed.

I strongly and vehemently oppose anything that gets in the way of the content. Imagine if Rothko’s paintings were displayed in a gold plated frame with LEDs flashing - I’m taking it to an extreme to make a point that designers should do as little as possible and allow the content to speak for itself. It doesn’t mean that we should get rid of designers and hand over a .zip file of the images. It means that don’t make the experience frustrating. Don’t add your own flair.

> representative of what the average user wants

The use of the word “average” implies measurement. I’d be interested in seeing quantified data showing what the average user wanted from this user interface. Surely the designer measured everything and produced an optimal product. How many milliseconds is the correct transition time for each animation? What particular transparency fraction is most pleasing and to what extent did different transparency values detract? Plot the function.

I say this mostly in jest because when I was a software engineer working with designers I’d rarely see any measurement or study. I have seen design decisions made after extensive user study but not always. Sometimes there’s just a pronouncement: This is “pleasing” and that is not—because it is so. If I wanted to change the search algorithm I’d have to show with measurement that the new one was better. If a designer wants to change the color of a button or the text on a label, no such measurement hurdle exists.

It’s entirely possible I’m wrong and the designers of this site have pages of data showing this particular interface to be more effective than alternatives. Not sure I’d bet on it in general though.

You think HN has a unified view? And does that "we" include me and you? Or is there a chance there might be levels of perspective and the point of this project has gone way over you?

I think when I was writing the post, I was rebuking the GP post about how HN always complains about the website design. In that sense, I was referring to “we” as HN.

Indeed, the reason I joined HN after being a silent viewer for a while was because I enjoy the arguments, the back and forth, essentially exploring levels of perspectives.

If "we" wanted to get rid of decoration then why are so many posts so long and full of extra language that doesn't really help get to the point?

It could be that "we" isn't the correct term to use.

I for one love this website. So clean and aesthetically pleasing. People who aren't devs would love the attention to detail, the high-res images and the animations. Well done!

PS: You can press your arrow keys to move forwards and backwards through each slide, removing the delay between the slides.

This site reminds me a bit of how the web used to be and I like that occasionally. It forces me to slow down and explore, not funneled through a proscribed experience.

[in the year 2000]

Conan: our modems will no longer be slow, so we'll fake the slow, client-side.

Artisian Internet

I started my career as a designer and I agree with you in principle, but this site was really frustrating to browse. I closed it after looking at one photo because I didn't want to wait to see more.

Yes, as I said this one's particularly slow, most transitions should be sped up. However most of them make sense, they're just way too slow.

The UI was slow as a trickle of cold honey on my machine. Because it was asking my machine to do more than it was capable of. Normally this isn't a problem. I use this machine to work on CAD models and while not a speed monster, it is doing just fine.

Heck, I can even run Slack on it.

Above a certain response time threshold a UI goes from being "slow" to being "unusable" or simply "broken". This isn't a matter of opinion, it is a reality. And I'm afraid that you will have to be a lot more charming and persuasive to make me forget reality :-)

UX specialists that do not take sluggishness seriously simply aren't UX specialists in any meaningful sense of the word. I'm sorry, but life doesn't hand out medals for mere participation.

(As for the site: I clicked around a bit, but the sluggishness of the site made me lose interest before really grasping what cleverness I was supposed to experience)

yeah I agree with this strongly. My experience with HN is that HN comments are essentially that HN users view non power users with contempt and dislike everything that can't be expressed through logical axioms.

It's almost like it's a holistic experience whose entire design criteria is not "get information into people's heads as fast as possible". The duplicates are pretty annoying though.

and besides, if you swipe the images left and right, the interface is plenty fast.

I don't mind artsy websites and animations if the topic is artsy. I hate them when they're supposed to show information and they present it as if using an eye dropper.

When eye-candy is needlessly drawn out, it feels sluggish and unresponsive. I don't know a lot about general users, but I know the users I work with and they foremost want FLUID INTERFACES. They don't always have them, but they always want them.

I strongly disagree that the topic should have anything to do in limiting the form used to present it. This site is a google art experiment. In art, form is usually pretty much just as important as content.