If you're at the top of the screen, at least in Chrome 153.0.8010.37, it has a little interactive bit. You have to scroll through the images in order to be dropped at the actual web page, at which point the images go back to being a regular part of the page.
It's less than OpenAI did for Astra, but that was my first encounter opening it and my first thought was that they decided they liked Astra's hero/scrolling animation. I'm pleased to see they didn't make the entire page that like OpenAI did, but I'm expecting to encounter this pattern more often on these announcements now.
Hijacking the scroll wheel has existing long before "AI". Many "high end design" websites that want to "tell a story" get woo'd into thinking it's a good idea. It's terrible, and feels like your scroll wheel is stuck in quicksand.
Parallax scrolling effects were very cool ~2010. By 2015 or maybe earlier it already felt like me-too design that's unoriginal and a little annoying. By 2020 everyone and their mom has it and it's super tiresome. Now it just screams slop design (among a million other signals).
Claude Opus 5.6 should have a new "UX safety" feature that requires annually-renewed preauthorization to generate webpages that hijack scrolling :)
???
It's just a standard hero image + text for me, with no scrolling effects.
edit: @iAMkenough figured it out, it was because I have prefers-reduced-motion enabled.
If you're at the top of the screen, at least in Chrome 153.0.8010.37, it has a little interactive bit. You have to scroll through the images in order to be dropped at the actual web page, at which point the images go back to being a regular part of the page.
I agree that it's sort of stupid, not a fan.
It's less than OpenAI did for Astra, but that was my first encounter opening it and my first thought was that they decided they liked Astra's hero/scrolling animation. I'm pleased to see they didn't make the entire page that like OpenAI did, but I'm expecting to encounter this pattern more often on these announcements now.
Two posts were merged; this comment was for the blog post with an intro animation thing.
On mobile at least, you have to scroll to get the TOC to appear. Then keep scrolling to actually move off from the hero to see the text.
For a marketing page, it’s not the worst UX I’ve seen, but still slightly annoying.
then you're getting served a different website
On mobile its different.
Figured it out: you have "reduce motion" enabled in your device's accesibility settings.
Everyone that doesn't gets served some animated bullshit.
>Figured it out: you have "reduce motion" enabled in your device's accesibility settings.
Yep, you're right. I tried on my phone and got the scroll through image.
I told my team to smack me upside the head if I ever try to ship something so daft as that.
The performance in Firefox is terrible too, I couldn't make it past the hero
Totally! So unnecessary and annoying.
I call it scrollslop
Hijacking the scroll wheel has existing long before "AI". Many "high end design" websites that want to "tell a story" get woo'd into thinking it's a good idea. It's terrible, and feels like your scroll wheel is stuck in quicksand.
Parallax scrolling effects were very cool ~2010. By 2015 or maybe earlier it already felt like me-too design that's unoriginal and a little annoying. By 2020 everyone and their mom has it and it's super tiresome. Now it just screams slop design (among a million other signals).
Those sites are also scrollslop. "Slop," as a term, is independent of AI
Turn on "reduce motion" in your accessibility settings and you get served a sane version.
and hijacking back/forward