Hi Kate, you guys are probably still tweaking away and have all of this noted, but I'll post some issues I have anyway:
- Thought I was saving the page from the Settings drop-down where it shows me the URL to my site and says "Update", rather than the "Done" button to the top right.
- Expected to be able to drag-and-drop the images to the canvas so I could do it en mass instead of click them, then have the clipart stick to my cursor until I dropped it/resized it before going back into the images panel.
- Not being able to see that the elements have styles attributed to them without clicking into them is kind of rough.
- Outlining an object by a bounding-box instead of the shape of the object can get confusing when you have multiple layers.
- In the layers drop-down, everything is listed as a "Text" element. Some without any description (shape preview would be nice). Should be able to delete the object after selecting it from within this panel too.
- I think the layout would be easier/more familiar for people if the top bar options were vertically-aligned to be a toolbar, and if the user actions bar at the bottom was up at the top right. Have a separate floating box or one that comes in from the right side for when you select an object that has attributes/FX to fiddle with.
- You can see the code but not edit it?
- Just realized where the background editor was. That should be a part of the primary toolbar.
Otherwise really interesting, would be great for creating quick instruction manuals and simple product pages. Like someone else mentioned, I am waiting on ReadyMag for this kind of publishing tool, but I like where things are headed here moreso than some other editors I've come across.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Yeah, we're definitely still tweaking the design and some of these issues are just things we haven't gotten to yet (3 person team - we're hiring!).
We did have the toolbar vertically-aligned before, but found that it got in people's way a lot more when they were trying to design the page.
Also, I'm kate@scrollkit.com if there's anything else you come across, this stuff is super helpful for us.
these are the ideas behind scroll kit and i'm glad you agree with them. but we'd be some pretty shitty hackers if we just talked about them and weren't trying to actually DO something to change things.
Absolutely. We seek to solve the problems we see in the world through technology.
I feel your message would be more honest if you went for an approach like WordPress did: with an open-source tool. You make money by providing a hosting platform for the less technically inclined.
And think about it. Wordpress actually did revolutionize publishing.
Nothing, but calling it a movement aimed to fix broken publishing when it's just another walled garden that will disappear at the first buyout offer is disingenuous.
To clarify a bit: I am annoyed not by what the product is, but by the way it's marketed.
I didn't even make it that far. [EDIT:Although, wanting to comment, I did go back and read the whole thing.]
"make them scroll" ... um, no. The increasing number of pages that are requiring vertical scroll to be useful loses the great usability/accessibility of the "above the fold" method of pages. Even with the improvements in scrolling over the past decade (scroll wheel mice and scrolling gestures), it's still a chore that makes the "cost" tradeoff of some sites (including, I'll admit, this one) to be "not worth the effort."
That's nice. I don't like to scroll. Surely there's someone else in the world like me.
From the article you linked:
"[P]eople used the scrollbar on 76% of the pages,
with 22% being scrolled all the way to the bottom
That's a low enough conversion rate for certain page types that it may not always be worth the effort. If I want something, I'm happy to scroll, but if I'm browsing, there had better be a good value proposition in doing so.
"Another eye-tracking study conducted by CX Partners
confirms that people do scroll if certain design
guidelines are followed"
... So, the article says (several times) people scroll, but only under certain design conditions. Is a long form article worth scrolling for? Usually; it's better than ad-ridden pagination, I think we'll both agree. Where the OP went wrong, I think, was that the scrolling was a design gimmick, not a content opportunity. It came across, to me, like the purpose of scrolling was to be
"artsy" and "design-minded", rather than to convey content. Perhaps what I'm attributing to the scrolling design was really a lack of editing for length.
Jakob Neilsen (who was mentioned in the article you linked) also comments on why scrolling might be less of a good idea [1]:
"scrolling ... can be difficult for users with motor skill impairments."
"Low-literacy users can't easily reacquire their position in the text
after it moves.
"Elderly users often have trouble getting to the right spot in scrolling
menus and other small scrolling items.
Not everything you read on the Internet is wholly true.
Web publishing isn't broken because of the experience of making a page, it's broken because someone else determines the experience of visiting a page. This gives publishers control over the visitor's experience.
You're able to build a completely unique site from a blank page in scroll kit. You are given a text form in other publishing platforms. Those are pretty different terms.
A large part of the value of the web is in creating _structured_ data. I would be amenable to a proposition that gave people more creative tools for publishing on those terms, but I think you're missing the point of the medium.
I believe, that this is the view of a lot of persons/companies, that make money of the web. And I have to disagree, because of my experience with a lot of "not so savvy"-users.
For them, they like good information (or entertainment) and they really like the personal touch to things. If the information is interesting, they like to know more about the individual behind these pages. and a lot of these people like the handcrafted touch of "older" websites, that do not look all alike (wp, svbtle, octopress, et al).
So maybe the product is interesting for some of the people, who are not skilled in designing individual pages, but want non the less to publish on the web.
Just my experience with the 99% of people, that are not hackers, professional bloggers or net-savvy-people. Me, I'm going to stay with nanoc [http://nanoc.stoneship.org/] and jekyll [https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll] and for the time being (until redesigns are finished) wordpress.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone has made the activity of creating structured data sufficiently interesting or worthwhile for "not so savvy" users, but that this project doesn't seem to advance to cause.
A lot of people and companies do make money on this, but I see the creation of rich structured data as good for everyone. We can better learn from and engage with well structured collective knowledge.
structured data is actually something i'm really into. what sort of metadata or tags do you think might be useful to add in automatically? i don't want to make the user do any more work than necessary.
I like the thought behind this. There is a disparity between the layouts of the print word and the web, though, I think there are a lot of reasons that this is true.
For one, the technology that allows this coupling of design and copy has been slowly maturing and at times has been very cumbersome. In the past, sites that tried to break the tabular, "only text" mold were often slow to load and broke without third party libraries.
As internet speeds improved so did third party support and the design process for this new technical media. The interoperability of the technologies could still lead to a lot of pain when developing for everyone and doing so in a fashionable way.
Now, we're at that fork where everything has matured enough that it's opened up the ability to infuse more character and creativity into our designs and the technology allows the feasibility. However, I think there's still a gap. There's a gap between the idea and the effort required in order to achieve it. There is still transition between the idea, the design and the realization and often we see a loss of inspiration as it comes to that fruition.
I think there is still headway to make on the fluidity and experience of the digital domain. That visceral reaction that many of us enjoy when rifling through the pages of a book or glancing through the glossy pages of a magazine have yet to be duplicated, even if this site makes a great stab at it. To remove the consciousness of the square portal of emitted light is going to be the next frontier though.
I like it. Lots of personality, you know they're there to make it fun.
We could do with a return of the GeoCities self-made-page aesthetic (with improved aesthetic sense, of course) on a web where everything on the big sites is neatly templated and identical in layout. Amidst all the consistency, I've been missing the touches that used to make personal sites unique. All people do on their blogs now is throw on funny pictures; the format/layout is never broken, or it simply can't be.
This is a good reminder to us to break the mould whenever we feel it's appropriate (or whenever we feel like it).
That's an excellent point. But I hope people who build mold-breaking tools realize that most people don't have sufficiently strong aesthetic sense to create beautiful things out of the gate.
I feel the opposite and don't particularly care for it. The page is basically content free has some content that is difficult to read and contains seizure inducing animation.
Blame the move toward blogging systems that separated content from presentation. Blame advertising which has to be front-and-center at all times.
I wonder how advertising would work on the web if you didn't have omni-present ads but instead sometimes the viewport contained no ads, sometimes it contains big huge ads that take up the entire viewport (like a full-page ad in a magazine). Would that make up for them not being visible at all times? Anyone tried this?
Interesting thought. Never thought about it this way (and working in an environment, where it might fit).
Not trying to defend the practice of ads like they are today, but thinking twice brings one thought to my head:
Why recreate the style of an old medium in a new one. When the printing press was developed - for the first decades books just looked like before. looked like they were handwritten by scribes. Gradually books evolved into something more of their own.
So why build digital copies of magazine-layout? I really do not have a better solution - I am merely asking the question, that keeps bugging me all the time, when I think about the evolution of the web.
> Your idea sounds similar to some websites that show a full page banner with an x in the corner before visiting a certain page.
Similar, but not the same. That's more like sticking an ad on the cover of a magazine. If you are presented with content, then have to scroll past an ad I think the experience might be better. Currently we live with sidebars that contain omni-present ads.
the separation of content and presentation has been important in web design from a code perspective. CSS exists because separating content and presentation was desirable. But most people don't want to deal with all that mess. They want to make a fun web page quickly and easily to serve whatever purpose they have in mind right then.
I'm not talking about CSS, I'm talking about removing the content from HTML and sticking it in a database. Thus HTML is merely a template to be reused over and over. Hence boring layouts that work with all content equally well. In some situations this is critical, I'm not arguing against its existence, but we've gone too far in that direction whereas, as this article points out, there's not a lot of tailored web pages on the internet any more. Which is a shame.
The ethos here reminds me a lot of the edgier elements of the Web design community in the 1997-2002 period. For some reason, a lot of it died out after that, but there was a real enthusiasm to do some magical stuff and large collectives like the Swank Army were putting out amazing and experimental work (often leaning on early CSS and gigantic nests of tables). I'd love to see that culture come back to the Web in a big way.
Yeah, I remember. Dreamless was a truly ad-hoc institution though, and the tools people used to participate were all freely available and took some effort to use and understand. The aesthetic is similar, but I think the sentiment here is really different.
Was that the discussion site where they didn't sanitize embedded CSS..? So when you loaded the page, it kept changing style because every commenter had overridden styles?
Wow, this is kind of wonderful. It somehow does "vibrant yet professional" really well, in contrast with the "genuine amateur" feel of scrollkit. They have one hell of a designer, that's for sure. Seems like they're proposing a Photoshop/Flash-like rich-app design interface for webpages?
I'd like to play around with the app but the Team slide is causing my browser to hang.
Shame, their team page is brilliant. You can so clearly tell who the designers vs. coders are by their shoes.
Definitely hipster enough, but with a more professional European style than the NYU-Hipster Runoff style of ScrollKit. I personally prefer Readymag actually.
I'd substitute the gradients on your site for solid colors, they're a little too intense. Also the signup password field being in plaintext isn't quite right.
I like what Edit Room tries to do but I think you need to look into finding a UX or UI person that understands web design/development because it is a little too geeky/subtle in implementation for the user that this is targeted for. However, I like how it focuses you in on the content and content-type before you get into designing around it.
Thanks very much! I've been working hard on making the UX better, and will have a nice solid update shortly, that should address your concerns. I'll let HN know as soon as the improvements are ready.
One nice thing that's coming is being able to design for different screen widths with a built-in breakpoint tool that creates media queries for you from your design.
It does seem like many more people are building web design apps, that's all. I like it. This one seems like a decent start, i'll be keeping an eye on it.
Isn't HN meant to be the kind of place to share this stuff? I love the philosophy behind it, I feel like these guys are having a serious crack at building something that ordinary designers can use to make really beautiful pages without needing to know how to code.
The design of that page is really compelling and tasteful. Neatly showcases what the platform can do while retaining your attention.
And as for the haters, all I can say is - if you made it to the bottom of the page then they are definitely doing something right. I'm sure if you were part of their target market the final flourish would work too and you would be keen to sign up.
This one reason I don't read blog articles in an RSS feed. I aggregate them with one, but follow links to the blog owner's site so that I'm reading their content as they designed it.
Sometimes I really hate the English language. I think in highschool I remembered which adjectives meant good and which meant bad, but now they all completely confuse me. Hella, bad, the sarcastic awesome, wicked, twisted, ...
I didn't get the CTA at the end. Join... what? I'm totally unclear about what I'm joining. I like the sentiment of the project: "back to DIY, one-off, unique pages- like in magazines!" but I don't understand how signing up for... something (?) will help me do this.
Throw me a bone: show me a bit -at least a video- of what you're offering before asking me to sign up.
There is a youtube link with a thumbnail of a bear and some fire and lasers or something, I assumed it was decorative because most of the visual aspects of the site are.
Upon further investigation you can try the tool right on the page, I just didn't know this because there was no CTA for it, as there was no "See it in action!" CTA over the video. Startupers pitching your project to users: make it as simple as possible to see your value prop- don't make me work for it :)
It's a very nice idea, I would love to see more creativity in the web, but I don't think I agree with the implementation or what I see as the user base. Every blog page is not just a template, it's someone's vision of the world. It's an identity and a brand that the blogger tries to create and extend to its users. Using this new style the blogger would completely lose any form of identity and become more of a sparkling instagram knockoff than a medium to share rich content to its user base.
Yes, so? Early printing press probably was less developed than hand copied books in terms of design, but it evolved, which is what they're proposing we do on the web. I don't get your point.
Yeah. One thing scroll kit does really well is allows the screen to be filled with a single idea/image/composition. I haven't seen a lot of sites experiment with serving ads that way though.
We're a tool for people to make webpages without using a template, so they can start from scratch with a totally blank canvas. You can see the sort of things people are making here: http://www.scrollkit.com/s/I6QWRuK/
Scrolling through those -- I don't know if I should be impressed or not: how much effort are these to make? -- I saw one that doesn't render well for me:
(on an old version of Chromium, 6.0.472.63 - for some reason I am browsing on a stable Debian, but the rendering of css/tables on that version of Chromium seems pretty solid).
Aside from uncertainty, I did have a positive impression: these are pages that aren't instrumented with cruft around the edges, and that makes a huge difference.
Wait, Is there really a picture of blonde girl standing in front of a bunch of Asians with the title 'Make it meaningful'? What message is being conveyed here?
- Thought I was saving the page from the Settings drop-down where it shows me the URL to my site and says "Update", rather than the "Done" button to the top right.
- Expected to be able to drag-and-drop the images to the canvas so I could do it en mass instead of click them, then have the clipart stick to my cursor until I dropped it/resized it before going back into the images panel.
- Not being able to see that the elements have styles attributed to them without clicking into them is kind of rough.
- Outlining an object by a bounding-box instead of the shape of the object can get confusing when you have multiple layers.
- In the layers drop-down, everything is listed as a "Text" element. Some without any description (shape preview would be nice). Should be able to delete the object after selecting it from within this panel too.
- I think the layout would be easier/more familiar for people if the top bar options were vertically-aligned to be a toolbar, and if the user actions bar at the bottom was up at the top right. Have a separate floating box or one that comes in from the right side for when you select an object that has attributes/FX to fiddle with.
- You can see the code but not edit it?
- Just realized where the background editor was. That should be a part of the primary toolbar.
Otherwise really interesting, would be great for creating quick instruction manuals and simple product pages. Like someone else mentioned, I am waiting on ReadyMag for this kind of publishing tool, but I like where things are headed here moreso than some other editors I've come across.