Show HN: Add a custom cursor to improve your UX | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Add a custom cursor to improve your UX

customcursor.com

17 pointsmatthewmueller41 comments

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I'm not sure if it is my oldish (2010) MacBook pro, but the coursor is very laggy.

And I'm not sure if this really improves your UX, it feels annoying just like scrolljacking.

Do you have any data that shows it provides an increase in conversion etc?

Also (very slightly) laggy on my 2014 MBP, even when forcing it to use the discrete gpu.

It is not laggy at all on my HP Probook 6545b, which is pretty crap compared to MBPs.

Thinkpad T430, Firefox under Linux — no lag. I don't think that moving a bitmap over the screen should be slow on 2010 hardware (well, even on 2000-ish hardware). Probably it's just so obscure that browser vendors don't notice / test for small performance regressions.

Oh god. Time is a flat circle, 90s are having a comeback, now this, tomorrow under construction gifs and faux 3D buttons in framesets.

The cringiest part is I do believe their usecase (huge annoying CLICK cursors over “buy now” buttons) just _might_ increase conversions enough to be worthwile.

This site triggered all kinds of old memories for me. Setting my cursor to be an X-Wing in Win95/98. VRML. That brief stretch of time when setting custom scrollbar styles for your site was considered cool.

The status bar! We should bring that back.

<table><tr><td><table><tr><td>Welcome to my website!</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

Firefox (I mean Phoenix, or is it Firebird?) being ultra slim and fast. I miss that.

And yeah, framesets. Oh man. I bet there are millions of lines of Javascript and CSS that exist solely because frames aren't hip.

I don't even know in which universe this can be called “UX improvement”.

In the "just graduated from college and finding sober life a little difficult" sense, I would imagine ...

Yeah... no. What about users that use high visibility cursors? Think accessibility, people.

Is there anything to suggest this actually improves user experience rather than just making it different?

This was an annoying javascript trick back in the 2000s, it still makes me ask "WTF" when I go to a Gawker blog, the only place I know that still trys this trick.

Do you have use cases (such as the contextual pointer/text cursor change) where it productive to change the cursor?

I really hope that this is a joke. I figured that clicking "Buy Now" would go to a page admitting that this was a joke, but it did not.

We knew that this was a bad idea in 2002, so I don't know why anyone would think that we'd change our mind now.

15 years ago? http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/customcursor.htm

Defying users' expectations about standard browser features is the polar opposite of a UX improvement.

"I was on the fence about paying these guys $200/mo for their SaaS product, until I saw that their cursor was a rocketship"

Unless you're building a website for children, I'd be very, very wary of this.

Firstly, don't do this.

Secondly, if you insist on doing it, don't pay 5 bucks for it. It's just cursor: url(...);

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor

this is not consistently supported across browsers. plus no rocket-like rotation :-)

IE 6+, webkit 1.0+, firefox 1.5+. It's been supported for a loooooong time.

We would love to have used cursor: url(...); but in our testing you run into constraints (like sizing and rotation) that don't let you do the stuff we're doing here.

In my experience with cursor:url(); in Chrome at least, fairly large image sizes are allowed, and work fine. I haven't tried on other browsers.

I don't understand why one would want the image to rotate?

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by rotation.

I had no cursor at all before it loaded, you should fix that before getting money from people.

Ehh, it's an interesting Idea, not a big fan though to be honest. It's too striking and the cursors are huge. It will probably be like the next scroll tag, a way people can make shit appear in your face and it will just get abused.

Cursor size can change, but it's a non-interesting idea that people thought was cool in 1998 and learned otherwise.

There's obviously a lot of opportunity for abuse in this kind of thing - I'm reminded of custom scrollbars - but I think their shopping cart example is pretty compelling. As with everything, it needs to be used sparingly!

This made me cry.

If you want to improve your user experience this should be the LAST thing you would do. I was expecting them to have a more accurate or easy to see cursor, but it's just the scrolling marquee all over again.

I see a lot of comments taking this seriously. Is it actually serious? It looks like they're accepting real money, but I still have trouble believing it's meant to be taken seriously.

The "Pay With Card" and "Pay With Paypal" buttons simply don't work for me. Chrome 39.

Hmm interesting, they're working for me on Chrome 39. Are there any JS errors?

Yes, StripeCheckout is being called when it's not defined and they have a problem removing a Node.

Ahh good catch, got it. we accidentally had "async" in our <script> tag. Thanks!

This causes my cursor to disappear when I mouse outside the window, which makes this DOA.

Hm, that shouldn't happen. Which browser are you using?

Safari 7 and Safari 8. I cam say I'm not seeing it in Chrome though.

No No NO NO! First of all, mobile users don't even have cursors. Second of all... just NO.

Is that the new "smooth scrolling"? It's equally annoying.

Looks like "install new smileys" malware all over again.

Reimagined an old idea for practical usecases

Not an improvement at all. Highly annoying.

Somehow reminds me of Comet Cursor. :)

HN is unable to identify jokes.

I'm not convinced.

Gave me cancer

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