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Comment by brryant | Hacker News Reader

The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?

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I absolutely despise this trend. I don't know why it's so popular lately. This is the animated gif background and midi of our time.

Well we're seeing it more often in UI/UX because "forced creative vision" aka "design dictatorship" is more popular and acceptable for designers these days. Especially new designers who don't want to stick to the tried and true rules of design (nor learn them), nor base their designs off of some kind of metrics or best practices statistics. Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy.

Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

Clients like it because they think the cool kids are doing it.

Clients also like gimmicky scroll effects and parallax.

> Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

How does that happen?

Because they're the ones hiring agencies, deciding mood and content based on presented ideas, and then approving and revising design throughout the process.

Welcome back <blink>

> Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy.

Apparently users like being told what they want

It is a balance, which is why Steve Jobs got to say what he said and do what he did: with his experience in Zen Buddhism, he understood, above all, balance.

Design is two things: understanding people, and creating. You have to balance a pure empathy and understanding of needs and desires with uninhibited creativity. Only then will you create something that people both want and have never seen before.

http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/10/28/what-kind-of-bu...

Maybe. But correlation does not imply causation. Users like beautiful quality products that also function as status symbols. They like when the choices have been made for them so they don't have to walk around Best Buy for 2 hours trying to narrow down which laptop they want out of 30 others. But not necessarily someone ignoring their needs and replacing them with his own.

It's a multi-page slideshow with vertical transitions, not a single scrollable page. Main benefit is that you can design in full pages, and you don't have to care about how it looks mid-page. Also, it makes animations and 'on page'-interactions possible. It actually works pretty well once (and if) you get used to it. I guess it could be a bit nauseating for people who have become one with the mouse wheel.

> I guess it could be a bit nauseating for people who have become one with the mouse wheel.

Those were my feelings exactly. It feels much more natural to be able to scroll the part of the page you're interested in to whatever part of the monitor is most comfortable for viewing. Also, this prevents you from quickly scrolling down to a lower section of the page.

Designer here. I would never do that to my users.

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