Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeformed | Hacker News Reader

What you guys think about my carousel implementation? IMO, it is done tastefully. I made this site for a friend of mine: http://indieviddy.com/

It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).

View on HN

Looks pretty, but there's no (obvious) way to control it (so when items drop off you can't get them back - that is, until they eventually loop back around again).

There's a couple of other issues with your site as well - it seems fixed to a very wide width (possibly due to the carousel?) which is not only quite significantly wider than many laptop displays / non-maximized browsers would reach. And you seem to have some character encoding issues as you're apostrophes are being replaced with �.

On a personal note, some of the fonts are too big as well. Your site reads more comfortable when I've zoomed out twice (which also fixes the width issue as well).

Aside that, the landing page looks well polished enough (I didn't venture further in).

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0

Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye.

The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally.

I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.

> Thanks for the feedback. The portfolio wasn't meant to be solely accessed through the carousel - there's a dedicated page for it, and the carousel was just a "look at all these things I've worked on" statement. I guess I didn't clearly communicate that. You aren't really meant to navigate it, rather just to look at it's breadth and click on one if it caught you eye.

I realised that was more a showcase than for navigation. What I meant was that if one did catch your eye just as it was falling off the page - you can't bring it back. It can be argued as a pretty miner issue I'll grant you. But that was my immediate thought when I saw stuff drop off the side :)

> The width is indeed because of the carousel - I meant for it to go of the page. Is that causing weird scrolling problems? It's supposed to be overflow-x: hidden. Is that causing weird tablet scrolling issues? You're not supposed to be able to scroll horizontally.

This is was in Firefox on ArchLinux (laptop). I definitely have a scrollbar at the bottom. Sorry mate :(

> I'll have to look into the character encoding issue - thanks for that report.

I notice you don't have any meta tags for encodings. I wonder if that might be causing the issue (I should stress - I'm not an expert on these matters): http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#character-encoding

It looks really pretty. However, it frustrates me the same way that using Netflix's UI does. The scroll speed on the carousel is crazy slow! I'm not going to sit for 45 seconds waiting to see what else is in the carousel and if it's interesting enough to warrant me clicking on it.

Not sure if that's the feedback you were looking for, but there it is ;) As I said, I do dig the overall aesthetics of the site.

Dang. It wasn't meant to be a thing that you navigate through - it was just a little preview of the actual portfolio page. I guess I didn't communicate that clearly. Thanks for the feedback.

I just thought I'd chime in that I thought the carousel looked good and it was pretty apparent that it was just a grab-your-attention thing, but that the content was further down the page. Other than the issue of screen scrolling horizontally (I also had a vertical strip of whitespace fixed to the left of the page) it looks pretty good

I think this is actually a pretty good use of a carousel. It's nice looking, and like you said >It's just an aesthetic presentation of non-essential content (random portfolio items).

The only thing I would add is a way for the user to interact with the carousel if they needed to. Most people will ignore it, but if a game does catch someone's eye, it's currently impossible to scroll backwards to check it out.

I think I can best express what I think of it in code.

     <marquee onmouseover="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 0, 0);" onmouseout="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 6, 0);">

It's certainly a nice implementation of what it's supposed to be an implementation of. But it's effectively just a resurrection of the <marquee> tag.

Not a fan. If the user wished to interact with it, you can't advance/rewind slides manually, so it's annoying. If the user doesn't wish to interact with it, it's still moving and distracting and wasting space, so it's still annoying.

The carousel isn't 'loud', but it's still being ignored. And as someone actually uses the page, it's quickly scrolled off the page.

I think he might have been better served by putting those portfolio items in the sidebars.

That's okay, it wasn't meant to be the focus of the page - just a little banner of imagery. I guess it would've made more sense if it wasn't clickable and didn't move. The clickable content is meant to be primarily navigated on the Portfolio page.

It's an interesting take, but is still extremely frustrating to interact with. I would like to navigate through the images at my own pace and click forward/back exploring content, which the carousel prevents me from doing. It's also not obvious to me where I can find the same content in a different format- it looks like mostly they're taken from the portfolio section but I didn't know that until I drilled around the site for a while. I'd at least include a "view all" link below the carousel.

> It's also not obvious to me where I can find the same content in a different format- it looks like mostly they're taken from the portfolio section but I didn't know that until I drilled around the site for a while.

I guess that's the main problem. It wasn't meant to be a navigable thing, just a preview of the portfolio content. I figured once someone clicked on one of them, they would see the other games. I think maybe it looks more important than it's meant to be. It was just a little graphical banner that became fancy.

Not a site critique, but nice business idea. Posted it /r/gamedev subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i1amy/marketing_fo...

Animation is kinda janky on Chrome 28... mystery meat navigation, seems like I'm interacting with a train (slowdown on hover, speed up on hover out). Yeah, you're better off without it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com