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Comment by Jayschwa | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the fad in making content flop around the page as one scrolls. At the very least, it would be courteous of them to respect the prefers-reduced-motion media query.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

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I find them quite annoying. I'm pretty sure the only people enjoying these kind of animations are the designers themselves.

Most people don't go to a website to have an "experience". They just want to find some information as fast and easily as possible.

> Most people don't go to a website to have an "experience".

Well, with the things that people do routinely, they rarely do it for the experience. But that does not mean they do not experience it. That experience should certainly be prioritized while keeping the goal of the users as a top priority.

That experience is prioritized by keeping the goal of the user as the top priority.

The only thing I want is some info and to get out. Very few people go to a business website to enjoy the animations.

Edit: No one goes -> very few people go, shout-out to DylanDmitri and Stripe.

I like Stripe's page a lot better than this one though, for reasons I mention in my response to DylanDmitri.

To be fair, I go look at Stripe's homepage every couple months just because it's pretty.

It also doesn't animate text though. The content is all in place, with pretty animations and such in the background.

Not my preferred look, which is admittedly pretty spartan, but it works.

Edit: It does animate the code being typed. But that seems less critical to me then the main body. I would still prefer it to be static personally, but it works.

I do this too :)

I believe stripe's designers include @destroytoday, his design of paper 53 impressed me a lot several years ago [1]. Surely it also contains animations, but it's more elegant and smoother.

[1] https://destroytoday.com/blog/building-the-pencil-page

I dont think designers like moving text either, I think they are told to make it happen, and they do.

The worst part is that those animations get replayed when scanning back over earlier parts of the page.

It's one of the few truly bad design paradigms made popular by Apple in recent years. Their site has always been full of it.

>made popular by Apple in recent years.

Oh I have vivid memories.

Mac Pro Trashcan 2013. If I remember correctly it was the first time Apple turns to using lots of animations for their product page. Before that Apple's product page were fast, beautiful and elegant.

The TrashCan webpage was using lots of animations to show case their cant innovate anymore my ass. Your MacBook Fan would spin up simply by scrolling through the page as if Apple were nagging you its time to upgrade your Mac.

I think they learned their lesson and tune down those animation abit with later products and pay more attention to performance. But since then it has spread across the industry like plague. You dont get fired for using and designing with flashy animation because Apple are doing it.

They did overdo it with the trashcan.

I also remember that for the longest time ever they had a far too clever trick to show movie-quality videos at a time when browsers didn't really have video. They would have dozens of png pictures that they would stitch and change on the fly using Javascript. And it worked surprisingly well.

they say "we animate in certain elements to bring your attention to them" but so many things are moving!

it's wildly confusing, unless you scroll very slowly and wait for (most of the) things to stop animating

> prefers-reduced-motion media query

Thanks for this. (Yet) another fingerprinting vector I didn't know about.

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