Van Gogh Museum
vangoghmuseum.nl
vangoghmuseum.nl
Just because something is "all the rage" - like this kind of scrolling implementation - doesn't mean that it's actually good for your users. And if you are going to implement a potentially frustrating feature like this, at least make sure you've tested it to within an inch of its life.
Edit: a lot of my problems with this site were caused by Chrome's "translation" bar popping up on every page transition, which was interfering with the scrolling.
But I agree about the scrolling. Even on an ipad, which I think is the standard device these days, the scrolling is broken at times. Sometimes I swipe up and a new page scrolls in. Ok. Sometimes I swipe up and some content scrolls in from the side. Ok. But sometimes I swipe up and nothing happens. Thats a bit confusing.
I would want to see some statistics there. A quick google search yields the following article from last year, which states that the PC is still the majority ahead of any type of mobile device, let alone the ipad as a subset of mobile devices.
http://marketingland.com/report-nearly-40-percent-of-interne...
However, when I want to look at a website to see how the designer planned it, I always grasp my ipad and look at it.
Because even if he planned it for Chrome on the desktop (which accounts for 50% on that website) I dont know the OS, the resolution, if he thoguht about a keyboard, a mousewheel, a mouse grasping the scroolbar or the trackpad of a notebook having a scroll area.
But yeah, the world of devices is pretty fragmented. Looking at an ipad doesn't mean too much.
Seems like this would be ideal for a mobile experience, the museum could have the URL within the exhibits (or a QR code, etc) and you could swipe through the information while in the actual Museum. But I guess currently it's just a nice desktop browser tech demo.
As for the desktop experience, I like the idea of arrow buttons on the side of the screen to cycle through the pages. Because it just feels so strange to scroll the mousewheel and not have the page respond with 1-to-1 movements matching the wheel (and also the latency is a killer). But the arrows just jumps through pages, and not changing content in the page, so you'll miss out on things if you click instead of scroll. Pressing the up arrow to go back to a previous page will not take you to the "start" of that page, but instead the last "scroll" of content.
When using the scroll wheel instead of the arrows, it doesn't actually do anything about half the time. And several times it just stopped entirely, requiring me to refresh the page to allow it to scroll again. This is on Chrome/Win7.
I just don't get why people continue doing this. This isn't scrolling, so don't use the scroll wheel. The buttons are a great idea, but they didn't implement them well.
The English version is here:
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en
The way the page has been coded (using anchors) rather than by figuring out which part to display using the scroll wheel directly could be improved.
But form-over-function seems to be all the rage on the web (contrast to say 1995 when this page would have been a much simpler affair without all the eye candy), even if I don't like it. Try looking at the paintings too instead of just being irritated by the scrolling and back button issues.
Wait what? Who is that most people? Maybe most people you know but certainly not most people in the general population.
EDIT: i thought I upvoted you. I was careful with the buttons. But your post is gray so I may have accidetally downvoted. Sorry.
Well, 'most people' not on tablets I guess. Scroll wheels are on just about every mouse now and even mousepads have that functionality.
I think the number of people that realizes that 'page down' also works is shrinking as more and more people move to non-keyboard ways of navigation.
Does the site work on a tablet?
And even using the arrow navigation, the experience seems broken, as it wasn't flying in the art until after I clicked down to the next section. I would see the art flying in, but it was too late, as it was moving down to the next section.
"In our opinion, van Gogh surely had color vision deficiency."
The site was developed by the same teams who created the Rijksmuseum website last year and uses some of the same technology.
As an aside: I'm from Auvers-sur-Oise, the place where Van Gogh spent his last 2 months and is buried :)
Yes, it has flaws - and not just the scrolling - stuff like having links rendered without underlining and in the same colour as body text.
But I could find the location, opening hours, and ticket booking link almost instantly, which is what 99 out of 100 of people visiting that site will want. It's well-designed from that point of view.
<meta name="google" value="notranslate" />
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218047
Personally I wished all those tourists that can't wait to get 'schroomed out of their minds' stayed at home but making drug use illegal for tourists and legal for the locals would be a legal and practical impossibility. They tried doing that in some places, all it led to was enterprising locals becoming either small time dealers or renting out their services to tourists.
Supply and demand. With drugs as long as it isn't legal everywhere I guess we'll continue to see this pattern.
Hope you enjoyed the museum, even in that state of mind, van Gogh was an amazing artist (and a substance abuser himself...).
Eindhoven and Utrecht are not touristy cities. However they do have large "non-local" populations (expats in the first case, students in the second) so perhaps your point still stands that it is not the locals regularly consuming.
Especially in the 18-35 bracket, above that it gets a bit less wild (naturally).
All the university cities have a relatively high proportion of substance abuse and quite a lot of that will be locals in the student age bracket.
But when comparing locals to tourists the tourists definitely make up a disproportionally large chunk of the drug users. And not all of them come for a few days, quite a few people move to NL permanently because of the lax drugs laws and end up in the social care system.
It's sad because really nobody wins there and there are no easy solutions. Re-criminalizing drugs will be followed by a significant increase in crime and the Dutch ability to influence the countries around them to adopt similar legislation is without any chance of succeeding.
What do you mean by substance abuse? And, how much do you really know about the drug habits of your thousands of acquaintances?
The few people that I know that are into harder drugs would not advertise that too openly but if there were no downsides to hard drug abuse that you can spot relatively easily if the consumption lasts for longer than a trial period then I don't think we'd have hard drug legislation to begin with.
In America for instance people would be a lots more circumspect about their drug use (but those barriers evaporate as soon as they set foot on Dutch soil and it is party time).
Tourists visiting cities simply because of the novelty factor of drugs being legal and then partaking in this out of curiosity are simply stupid, not addicts (they are stupid because they are not in any way positioned to know what they are buying and this results in quite a few trips to the ER each year).
But drug addiction does exist and the number of foreigners that end up in Dutch rehab programs and or shelters is huge.
It's even got a name here: drugs tourism.
Alcohol can be abused just like any other drug (and in fact, is probably the most commonly abused drug).
If someone is curious about psychedelic drugs, and they visit Amsterdam because they are decriminalized there, they are therefore stupid?
I can't really imagine that's what you mean, though that's what you wrote.
The fact that it is decriminalized does not mean that people won't be trying to take advantage of you.
Buying drugs is not quite buying a bottle of Sprite, it typically does not come in a container with a brand name on it and as a tourist you won't be hanging around long enough to work out which connections you can trust and which to stay away from. The person selling it to you just wants your money, once. For a repeat buyer the risks would go down considerably.
Feel free to ignore any and all of the above. We're off-topic far enough as far as I'm concerned, if you feel that buying drugs abroad in one-off cash transactions does not carry significant risk then I'm perfectly ok with that.
(By the way, many products sold in such stores do in fact come in branded containers including instruction booklets for safe usage, etc.)