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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Might want to start it scrolling automatically, or otherwise do a better job of communicating that there's anything to see on the page.

I got all the way back here thinking it was just a pretty splash screen, after trying for 30 seconds to click on things above the fold with no success.

Only after reading comments did I go back to see if there was anything I had missed. I suspect a lot of people clicking through will simply hit the back button and remember nothing but having seen a slow-loading picture of a face.

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I left the site without realizing there's anything else, before being prompted to scroll, and only realized that there was more after I read the comments here.

What you need is a half-hidden line of text or graphic near the bottom screen-edge. only way to hint at scrolling.

Hardly 'the only way'. With a animated arrow jumping up and down one can hint at scrolling. And by slowly moving bottom parts up and down you can hint at scrolling.

There is an arrow that pops up, prompting you to scroll.

The long load times are the main problem. That arrow will pop up only after everything has loaded. That takes a few seconds (more than almost any other popular website) even with a fast connection. Oh, and scrolling at any point before everything is loaded will result in a broken experience (the speech bubbles might not appear or the street might be invisible).

They either need to find a way to make it load faster or they might want to actually prevent you from scrolling before everything is loaded. It’s not elegant, but it would at least prevent some confusion. (The good thing is that even if you don’t scroll the page works. Sort of. Well, it’s a bit cryptic but all the functionality is there.)

The scrollbar on the right wasn't a bit of a give-away?

To be honest I had the same problem, but did eventually scroll. I think my initial hesitation to scroll was because the top of the page looked so much like it could be an entire landing page, with prominent twitter, facebook, and email links. Of course (now?) there's also a little popup that says scroll, which if clicked scrolls you to the beginning of Ben walking.

I saw the scrollbar, and the little hint saying scroll at the bottom of the page. However, using either the page down key or clicking in the scrollbar confused it. It only worked for me if I scrolled down with the down arrow key and I got to see the speech bubbles that didn't trigger the first time.

After 30s I was prompted to scroll.

It works great on the iPhone - didn't think twice about scrolling and was quickly impressed

It's too bad the site doesn't use high resolution textures for the iPhone 4. The site looks far sharper on my Macbook.

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