
Nasa's Visual Universe - ArtWomb
https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/nasasvisualuniverse
======
comboy
Hundreds of NASA photos. Arranged in a new and unique way. Never before you
had to wait so many seconds watching sliding animations to view the next
picture. Am I missing something?

Random link shows just a gray background under firefox then I have to wait 30
seconds to watch the initial animation again (ok, I can skip it down to 10
seconds).

I don't know what did they use machine learning for. What's good about having
small bubbles as links instead of a clear list of albums?

I'll drink coffee just in case but I think that's not the problem here.

~~~
whatshisface
This is what happens when the designer works on it for too long - imagine
flipping the pages back and forth but with only lorem ipsum on them, you would
optimize for the experience of sitting there and flipping the pages back and
forth instead of the experience of browsing content.

One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in
experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the
1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.

~~~
laumars
> One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in
> experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the
> 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.

This. 100% this!!

It's sometimes hard to not want to make pretty user interfaces - in fact why
_shouldn 't_ we have pretty user interfaces?! But the problem I find some
designers suffer from is they're so focused on an initial short term wow that
they completely forget (or simply don't care?) about any longer term usage.

They say first impressions count but so does long term exposure.

------
brudgers
Not being able to click through the images quickly gave me temporal space to
think. Slowing down and appreciating the amazing things the images depict. The
teamwork, engineering, bravery that went into making the images boggled my
mind once I stopped seeing them as just more lolcats. It made me conscious of
the clickclickclick way I ordinarily view images. It made me uncomfortable
with the way I treat the world. What more could I ask than to have my mental
habits questioned and my awe of the universe brought fore.

~~~
gundmc
Really appreciated reading your comment. I had a similar realization about the
way I consume internet media in the past and your post brought it back into my
consciousness.

It really is awe-inspiring what NASA has accomplished. They are still doing
amazing work, but I'm not sure anything in my lifetime will have the mystique
of the first man walking on the moon.

------
AnabeeKnox
Bad. Wait 5 seconds between clicks to see a photo with everything whizzing
about the screen giving you motion sickness. It's technically slick, but the
number of people who will use it actually view lots of photos is basically
zero, because the user-interface is so bad. Maybe that's not the point, maybe
this is just a technical demo.

~~~
alexlrobertson
That initial animation induced motion sickness for me and very rarely get
motion sickness from video games, VR, movies, driving, flying, etc.

------
askafriend
I really enjoyed the presentation of the content. The transitions were very
cool (maybe a tad long but nothing worth complaining about in my opinion).
Plus the transitions probably acted as a filler for loading time instead of
having a traditional loading spinner.

Really impressed with how polished, smooth, and immersive the whole experience
is.

How content is presented is just as important as content itself in many cases.
I welcome and appreciate creative explorations like this.

~~~
magduf
I usually prefer simple and efficient, but the complaints against this
intentionally-artsy website really remind me of people who don't see movies as
a valid art form.

------
the_other
Once you get past the fluff and into a gallery, it’s just a themed gallery. I
habitually use screen zoom to make up for weak cision. The gallery carousel
breaks, becoming inctrollable or blank once zoom (on mobile Safari) is
engaged.

------
gleglegle
They've obviously put a lot of work on this, but the drawn out long
transitions are horrible and really take away from the images that should be
the focus of the experience.

~~~
tumetab1
I don't think so.

It's just a cloud word with photos associated that have captions which is kind
of lame.

Found "Mates" which is a weird clicked on it and the related photos are when
in the description the word "mates" appears, as in, "John and crew mates were
picked up by a chopper".

This seems to be just a AI buzzword abuse.

------
buboard
I expected some kind of map of the visible universe. NASA got my feelings hurt

------
folkrav
Breaking news: artsy website with animations - HN doesn't like it.

People over here have such a hard-on for efficiency and speed. I'll give it to
you, transitions are on the long side - I wouldn't mind the transitions taking
half the time they do now, or the image descriptions taking less time to
darken. However, if the idea was just to be a simple image gallery they'd just
give us a .zip file. It's obviously meant to be a laid back and slow
experience. IMHO here it's definitely too slow, but people over here seem to
hate everything that's not a blank site with 0 animations.

I work back-end dev, I used to think everything flashy on the frontend was a
waste of time. I then worked in a web agency, I've seen the thought process -
usually, with _good_ designers and UX specialists, the overall experience is
tailored to whatever feel they want the site to have. I worked on a virtual
expo site with a museum once, it was _meant_ to be contemplative and slow. You
guys would have immediately hated it, while if you took two seconds of your
life to just let yourself be immersed, the whole thing was a great experience.

People over here also love to rave how this is anti-user, but you people are
misunderstanding the average user. Power users like you are the minority. Most
people don't mind the animations, and a lot of them actually enjoy it.

~~~
spectramax
I couldn’t disagree with you more except the complaining usually takes over
the HN thread.

It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something
for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get
rid of _decoration_ and get to the essence of _what_ is being presented.
Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content.

“Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer.
It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. How can the user “Chill out”
if the browser comes to a crawl, phone heats up and is confused about what is
going on.

Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album
covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel
ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as
hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not
about “power users”.

~~~
folkrav
> It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants
> something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We
> want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being
> presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the
> content.

My whole point was that "decoration" can be enjoyable.

> “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer.
> It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. You haven’t put forth a
> compelling argument besides taking an anti-cliche stance.

You're assuming all users have this stance, and that's what's actually
condescending and out of touch to me. You haven't really put forward any
compelling argument that doesn't fit my description of HN users assuming what
they are looking for in a website is in any way representative of what the
average user wants. It's the same thing as the tech crowd getting shouting at
phone manufacturers because they're removing the headphone jack: surprise
surprise, the average user doesn't care enough about plugging in an adapter
that they won't buy the phone.

> Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album
> covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy,
> novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was
> slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS
> releases. It’s not about “power users”.

Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software. This is
part of Google's "Arts Experiments". It's _meant_ to be pretty and flashy.

~~~
btilly
I am not assuming.

I spent several years working in A/B testing. Based on behavior, none of the
artistic branding made any difference to whether users got engaged in sites.
Make the site fast. Put your action items in prominent places on the page.
Make them big and obvious. Make the site usable. Make it easy for people to
get to what they want. Those things mattered again and again. But pretty
aesthetics? Never once have I seen it matter.

Want to piss off a designer? Subject the designs to an A/B test. Want to
really piss off a designer? Show the resulting null result to the designer
afterwards.

As far as I am concerned, anyone focused on the look and feel of webpages
serves the purpose of making the people who own and run the site happy. If
they talk about what the users want, I have to ask what testing they have done
with actual users. If they can't produce tests, then I conclude that they are
spouting BS.

If this does not sound possible to you, I would suggest that you explain the
enduring popularity of minimalist websites like craigslist, plentyoffish and
google.

------
Keyframe
Interesting, but the site made my computer crawl almost to a halt. Computer
which is used for (and good at it) advanced rendering and simulations. A 12
core machine with two modern GPUs inside. Modern Web, and chrome, is a
travesty.

~~~
codydh
Interestingly runs fine for me on Safari 12.0.3 on a midrange 2017 MacBook Pro
15".

~~~
Angostura
Same here on a late 2013 bog standard 21" iMac

------
katabasis
I understand the UI is not to everyone's taste, but I think the idea of using
machine learning to create an engaging "window" into large sets of public-
domain images is a good one. It would be interesting to read more about the
process used to tag and organize the content for this project.

There are lots of other repositories of high-quality free content (museum
archives, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, etc) that could benefit from this kind of
machine-aided presentation.

------
laythea
The bad thing about this way of presentation, is that the circle bubbles are
dispersed, at any level. So I need to pan around just to read the text on
each, which is very annoying.

------
nsriv
Odd to see so much complaining when the page works beautifully on mobile.

------
AltmousGadfly
I have not seen such lags for a long time. NASA could try better.

------
ape4
There's a "rust" category

------
gkthegr8
The transitions are extremely annoying.

------
CzarnyZiutek
pointless forest

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

~~~
CzarnyZiutek
^ "The Humorless One"

