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Comment by bretthopper | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty poor attempt at copying the NY Times design for their Snow Fall project (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...).

It's lacking the top nav and the typography is terrible. Generally just lacks some polish and execution.

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I know bashing Microsoft is oh-so-tempting, but can you at least try discussing the actual article here?

But some people can't even read the "actual article" because the navigation is so broken.

This, pretty much. It's so distracting that the article is unreadable.

I was reading it on a Surface tablet using Metro-IE10 and thought the design and navigation were very slick. It works very well on it, every page starts with a fullscreen image, scrolling down the text appears while the image fades, at the bottom of the page the pagination links appear.

I looked at the NY Times project article and that did not work as well on Surface. They were undoubtedly inspired by it, maybe they optimized the design of this article as a showcase for their own tablet.

I was going to agree with you but the execution of this article is quite awful. The worst part of it is how there was no reason for this to be subdivided into pages.

An average page in the Microsoft story has fewer than 700 words.

In the NYT's Snowfall, the average chapter is 3,000+ words.

The NYT has an incentive to increase pageviews with pagination. Microsoft is paginating their press releases.

Thanks.

I didn't realize there were more pages. I just thought it was a very short and fluffy article.

Same here, now I have to got back to the story. Funny I don't remember seeing a way to get to another page...

What? There's more than just one page?

I know MS is a favorite target, but this honestly looks like it was designed by an intern.

More importantly, it reads like a jewelry advertorial in an in-flight magazine.

Is anyone able to watch the videos to the end? They seem to stop mid way for me- all of them. And I have a pretty fast connection.

They also die when I attempt to go fullscreen. Gave up.

Is it not relevant that they've copied a design straight from the NY Times?

Wow, "next page" is broken/nonexistent in firefox. I could only read the first page with it... Had to switch to Chrome to get past the first page.

And even then the "next page" button wanted to play peek-a-boo with me.

FWIW, I'm seeing next page fine in Firefox.

I'm on Chrome beta (27) on Mac and I also could not get nav to the next page to work. (It does work at the bottom of the final page.) I had to edit the freaking URL by hand, on a guess that the article was truncated.

I was in the middle of typing up how disappointing the article was because it appeared to be some sort of fluff PR piece. I noticed your comment before hitting submit and realized I had only read page 1.

Further pages can be found by clicking the next button that floats up when you approach the end of the screen - it worked for me in FF, though I don't consider such design comfortable.

That was the same thought I had. The worst part is that they split it up into "chapters" which are really just one page of text and a pic each. The whole point of these designs is to be able to scroll down through the whole story like you were casually flipping a magazine. Instead, the MS article makes you click a "next chapter" link at the bottom right.

The typography is screwed because of the seemingly faulty font stack in:

    .ncDcParagraph {
       font-size: 14px;
       font-family: Segoe,Verdana,sans serif;
    }

I think it should be "Segoe UI" which is a very nice font (on Windows) and it's falling through to Verdana which makes it look dated.

Details, details...

I just double checked using Opera Firefly and it seems to be fixed. I see Seqoe UI now :).

The page looks like a wreck. It's like it's trying to look cool and tripping over itself.

This is how nearly all of Microsoft's products are, at least they are consistent in their user experience.

The page takes forever to load and imposes a mental tax trying to navigate it. A real waste of bandwidth and my precious man hours. I don't care how much energy you save if you waste my time!

I was about to comment on how it is such a beautifully designed site, yet you get to the 'next page' button which is a low res scaled arrow graphic.. this totally ruins the experience.

I'm on Chrome (OSX) and the bottom nav nauseatingly slides up and down, up and down, up and... you get the idea.

Looks like they rushed to push this out. Expect more from Microsoft.

At least they are trying. I really, really liked the Snow Fall project, and I really want to see more stuff like it. The first step of taking that ball and running with it is naturally going to be imitation.

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