Kort - a thumbnail preview concept | Hacker News Reader

Kort - a thumbnail preview concept

lab.hakim.se

107 pointsthisisblurry34 comments

I don't really like this concept, but I do like this guy and his other work.

What I don't like: It isn't obvious that there are other thumbnails other than the first one. If a user wasn't aware that there are other thumbnails to view they would never think to hover over the image.

Your critique seems to be focused on the wrong details. The author was not demoing their ability to indicate there is a mouseover action. They were indicating their ability to create a compact, intuitive (once hovered) technique for browsing thumbnails. Your issue can be fixed in a number of obvious ways, but the behavior once activated is a non-obvious contribution.

> Your issue can be fixed in a number of obvious ways

Can you elaborate? I can think of obvious ways but they're aren't tasteful and ruin the effect.

Sure. One would be when you mouse-enter, a small circle or bar appears that fills in as you hold your mouse there, indicating something will happen once it becomes full. Another would be to have the other thumbnails "peek" out on mouse over, which provides the user a place to click to activate the browser mode to see them.

I love your second idea; nice one. :) (Not sure how to make it work for mobile, though, unless you have it "peek" out all the time.)

The first reminds me too much of dcurtis' "Kudos" circle, though, where something happens because you left your mouse in the wrong spot for too long; it's nigh-infuriating sometimes.

You're right – the intent is to demo the interaction when hovered and I did not spend any time designing the resting states. If this were to be used for something like a gallery thumbnail I think it's perfectly fine to not promote the hover preview at all. Users would discover it naturally as they mouse over to click on the thumbnail.

However if it's important the user discovers what's in the stack, this could be communicated visually like http://cl.ly/image/1c041l2e1S0O

I think an obvious stack (perhaps even more obvious than depicted in your screenshot) would help. Another thing you could consider is having the stack give a little more affordance as the mouse pointer approaches. Perhaps it could expand a little to indicate "hey, there's a behavior over here!"

I like the concept. However, to me, it was a little bit too easy to accidentally move my mouse outside the thumbnail area when trying to look through some pictures.

Could you try extending the mouseover area beyond the images themselves? I'm not sure if that would be more intuitive, but I think it's worth trying.

Sorry, but I'm not the author.

I agree. Even to watch the pictures correctly and one at a time, I had to learn to move the pointer really slow.

I really like the concept and the execution anyway.

Hakim El Hattab, the guy behind this concept, is on fire right now, with innovative UI concepts rolling out pretty much every month.

If you're interested in bleeding edge HTML5 experiments, you can watch Paul Irish interview him here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogumRA9LxR4

He's got a very impressive portfolio of work: http://hakim.se/

This is basically unusable with a mouse pointer because the bounding box is too small. The user interface is also non-obvious, at first I didn't know that I could move my mouse around and I would not have discovered it if this wasn't a tech demo.

Also these kinds of mouse hover events are useless on touch interfaces.

Actually it works perfectly on mobile safari on my iPhone. I wasn't expecting it to, being a hover effect, but was pleasantly surprised.

Agree...an improvement would be to add a transparent arrow on each side and only advance/go back when the user clicked or held down on the arrow. That probably exists already...

Has promise, just needs some tweaks.

I would try to make it 'less sensitive' when transitioning, so the user doesn't accidentally switch images.

Also there needs to be a way to tell that there is a layer of images. Maybe some relative positioning on the ones that are hidden?

Cool idea though.

Interesting idea, the interaction would get very difficult with more pictures in the stack. Also lacks a way to work in mobile. But you are really onto something here, would be interesting to see how this can be improved!

I like the concept, but the thumbnail should somehow show that there is a 'stack' of photos that you can page through. At first glance, it's not obvious that you can hover over a thumbnail to see more.

I'm not a big fan of the concept, but it's an interesting tech demo.

Now, compare the page as designed versus the page without CSS enabled. The one without CSS enabled is a much better user experience.

I like this, but could you make it a bit slower? Slowing it down would make it a little bit more accessible for those who have mouse trouble. Also keyboard keys!

I really like this. Could also be a great time-saver for professions that have to screen large volumes of photos, like busy newsroom photo editors.

I like author's Avgrund and Meny better. The thumbnail is neat but functional deprovment as it's not obvious there is a any more than one image.

Great idea. It capitalizes on the attributes of the mouse pointer and web browsers. If I were Apple, I'd acquire.

Apple acquires scripts now?

Programmers. You know, people who can make inferences.

Apple's had a less fancier implementation for quite a while now — thumbnail scrubbing in iPhoto and FCP on the desktop. I don't have any iOS devices to see if they have touch versions of their scrubber but I do remember seeing one on an iPad demo video some time back.

Very cool. I like the transitions, especially the last one. Just a heads up, it doesn't work on chrome 22.

I'm on chrome 22.0.1229.94 (osx) and it's working fine for me.

I'm on the same version for windows and getting diddly.

It's not working for me on Chrome or IE and just barely almost working on my android.

Intuitive and efficient. You, sir, have too many ideas.

I love all of his work. Worth checking out.

source on github - https://github.com/hakimel/kort

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