The first time I saw the use of parallax, I was dumbfounded.
Today, I still look at these visual effects, like color cycling, and just kind of sit there, dazed. No matter what kind of 3D is pushed my way, these don’t cease to amaze.
I remember playing F-Zero on my friend’s Super Nintendo. It must have been in the early 90s. Pogs were still a thing, and SCART was all the rage in Europe.
I considered myself lucky because I had a Master System with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built in. I even switched my console with a friend every once with in a while, his had Sonic. It was a 3.58 MHz beast at my fingertips. 8-bits of raw processing power delivered by a Zilog Z80.
So you can imagine my surprise when I first played F-Zero.
The background seemed to leap out at you, and reacted according to how you moved. Used to side-scrolling games, the sense of depth was breathtaking. Even though they were still simple graphics, it was enough to leave a mark on a young kid’s mind.
Years later, even though I’ve read plenty literature on the subject, I’m still amazed by Mode 7.
One caveat, before the reader starts raising his/her hands in the air and screaming to the high heavens. I am well aware that Mode 7 was known for allowing the seventh layer of background to be scaled and rotated, giving a certain use of 3D within the software. BUT, it was also known for providing the other 6 layers for the developers to play around with.
But I digress, we were talking about parallax, from the Greek parállaxis.
Skip forward to 2011, and focus in on Ian Coyle’s and W+K’s site for Nike, A Better World.
This is the first use of parallax in websites that I remember, and in retrospect, one of the first times I was amazed by a site. I also had the nagging impression that somehow I was being tricked.
My scroll wasn’t scrolling how it should intuitively. The speed was off, things that shouldn’t move, moved. Something was amiss.
Although it’s a technique that’s been used (daresay, overused) in the past years, I still find scroll hijacking is far from being a best practice.
It’s true that many times it’s used for narrative effect, but it creates a new interaction language that is not always intuitive. And un-intuitive interaction is not something desirable.
For example, remember all the buzz that was generated when Mac switched their desktop scrolling direction to match that of their iPhones?
If you stop and think about it, this is a change that follows an intuitive real-life model. If you push something up, it will go up.
There have been a ton of articles written on the UX of scrolling, including a great piece by Larry Tesler, brought up by John Gruber.
I think that we can all agree on one thing:
No matter if up scrolls up or up scrolls down, the scroll should follow a certain logic. There is no need or logical explanation to have scrolling up move the content left, or to have it do an unrelated action like load a site.
So, where does that leave us?
Hijacking a user’s scroll is akin to click hijacking (you know, click on a link and have three banners open up). It is something that you may be fooled to deem useful in certain situations. But deep down, you know it’s not. You’re not Robin Hood, you’re Butch Cassidy.
To boil it down:
- If it isn’t intuitive, it probably won’t work
- If you want to change the norm, make sure you have a darn good reason
- Just because everyone else jumps out of the window doesn’t mean you should
Next time you want to implement that kind of UX, I implore you: think of Butch Cassidy, or of John Dillinger.
Are you that kind of person?
