For those criticizing, think of this updated website more from the lens of art, less pragmatics. The Doug Engelbart "Mother of All Demos" functioned in this way as well. Can you imagine scoffing at Engelbart in the same way? There are quite a few deep ideas in this presentation of Dynamicland, many of which are subtle and take some effort to find and appreciate, much like art.
Yes, it is intended to be useful to many one day, and they claim it "actually works" _now_, but if you read carefully (and you should!), they are trying very hard to maintain (and gradually grow) a beautiful little flame of a vision. PARC, on the other hand, had 10 years. Afterwards, industry ran with the ideas they wanted, and Alan Kay has been beating the "you missed the big ideas!" drum since. The Dynamicland group is trying to learn from this lesson of history.
Seeing the Dynamicland tweets made me rethink all of Bret Victor's previous work, and I wrote up why it's interesting from a design perspective here: http://vitor.io/on-dynamicland
I don't think it's quite tired yet. This is a gorgeous execution of the technique, especially considering the interactive elements (Play close attention the maps portion...really nice 3D effect there).
As far as marketing goes I think it beats out the typical static landing page.
I agree it's more commerce than art, but having seen more than my share of this kind of hype presentation and after seeing the video, I think they did a decent job of acknowledging and integrating the surface/environment they were using.
Actually the design is innovative and very good in breaking the mold. As with anything new there might be some shortcomings, like being performance hog on the browser.
Really interesting proof of concept, not to mention the page is pretty! The majority of concept pages are super ugly.
One minor criticism, the "using 20 prescheduled audio events" sequence cannot be stopped by the stop button, it seems to just continue running (on Firefox at least).
It feels above average compared to the typical government site, but still a decade behind modern design. I wonder if open source will improve this? Props to the team for open sourcing it.
It's refreshing to see what is to my eyes clearly a cleaner and more modern design actually performing better than what looks like a kludgy FrontPage design. Too often these analyses purport to show the opposite.
That site looks great too, but looks are subjective. :) In this case I meant "fantastic" more in the context of an early project launch. I believe a site needs to communicate its few key messages to a new visitor quickly, and clearly as well as be easily accessible from a UX perspective. Gigayo does that IMO.
The web design used to be terribly unusable, with interface elements constantly feeling like they were trying to trick you. They managed to re-do it and improve it a lot.
It's a good sign. At one BWV per week, this project is going to take about 18 years in total. To succeed, they'll have to be prepared to go through many versions of the site.
Oh, I know the site design is getting a lot of hate but I think its very cool. I love seeing plays on interfaces like this, would love to hear more about how it was made and what inspired it!
So cool! I love "this site features music by Hive". Flash really unlocked the creative potential for UI design, which these days feels increasingly banal. It made UI more of an "experience" with sites like this.
That is an impressive adaptive site design update.
A couple of things I love about this is (1) the elegance of the menu toggle to top in the small (mobile-size) view and (2) the slideshow control appearance on small view and adaptation to breadcrumb implementation on large view. Quite elegant and appropriate for each environment.
Of course, it is sad that the experience is rarely consistent when you start digging deeper into the site.
Yes, it is intended to be useful to many one day, and they claim it "actually works" _now_, but if you read carefully (and you should!), they are trying very hard to maintain (and gradually grow) a beautiful little flame of a vision. PARC, on the other hand, had 10 years. Afterwards, industry ran with the ideas they wanted, and Alan Kay has been beating the "you missed the big ideas!" drum since. The Dynamicland group is trying to learn from this lesson of history.
Kudos to the group.
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