It is fun! The person you're responding to isn't wrong; front end is a little horrifying. But it's kind of like a jungle in that the scary beasts, swamps, poisonous plants, and the harsh elements are accompanied by incredible opportunities to experiment, explore, discover, and appreciate beauty.
Backend presents some awesome opportunities too, but I absolutely love weird problems like the one you're solving here. It's in the realm of simultaneously necessary and totally unnecessary. This is where interesting stuff happens!
Thanks! Site is still in stealth alpha and posted an article here in hopes to get -some- feedback. Didn't expect this kind of anger hahah. Very grateful for the positive comments though.
Im on the fence about pre-opening the 'tiles' on mobile. Do you (or anyone else) have any strong opinions on that?
I thought everything was pretty easy to use as soon as I realized what clicking a button would do (a little trickiness if you open the tile while the button is nearly off the top of the screen but honestly really great)
Because I don't know what the drop off rate is when someone reads this, take what I say with lots of salt.
Giving one button as a demo and then saying click on button to close (and leaving it implicit that the rest of the buttons need to be opened manually) seems good? Leaving them closed by default worked great for me!
Agreed, I really liked how the site looked. I thought it was really slick and I am blown away by the how easy the author added extra information in a blog post. Nice work!
I'm not seeing them show up, with or without JS enabled (firefox on android). I might suggest having some interaction for non-js users though (details element, perhaps?)
Thanks! It has some cons, like worse scanability. But I think its really cool that you can have something open next to your paragraph, especially when you need to consult the popup quite often. Like, a table with a bunch of data would also be quite nice with this approach I feel.
i've been wanting to implement a design like this for blogs for 5 or 10 years. Great work on the inline detail on mobile. genuinely better than whatever i would have made.
did you consider pushing the word(s) directly following the activation button to below the detail pane, rather than doing it based on line break?
It's something new IMO but we are definitely working on improving UX still. Fixing the overscroll issue as we speak. I'm assuming you're using mobile, would you prefer it of the 'tiles' all started in an open state?
It is not an experiment in how bad front end design can be pushed to be... Although that would be a fun blog post
I think the site looks fine. Just remove whatever is changing the scrolling and adding "smoothness" to it or whatever. Showing stuff as you scroll is cool, but interfering with the scrolling itself is not cool.
I am not on mobile. It all boils down to the way decade old convetions/expectations are broken.
The things that look like buttons (and are spans in the html code, not even anchors!) trigger non-local transitions (the left panel thing) when hovered... and they close the opened panel when clicked, so if I move my mouse to click on it the end result is a panel that flashes.
I need to keep ignoring the usual button affordance of being clicked and force myself to think they are tiggered on hover.
While you're here the little colored buttons, that expand to show more info are neat (note the first one in this article has template text at the moment) ; and when they expand and highlight the text with color they can clip other nearby text
