Parallax and Multi-Directional Comics
I'm not a huge fan of flat minimalism as broadly applied to design. It's everywhere. I often walk into coffee shops that look like the Apple store, which in turn look like a flat website, which essentially resemble a piece of white paper. I get the appeal. I understand the cleanly spaciousness of white box galleries. If I wanted to, I could eloquently argue in favor of including minimalism as one of Neilson's design heuristics. Actually, let me do that now.
Minimalism is an ideal mate of User Experience design. Strip a site (or any tool) of as many elements as possible until is offers only the most essential interactions. In general, when people interact with the internet, they feel assaulted by an infinite barrage of information. It's overwhelming and uncomfortable. The amount of information and options and decisions put before us make users feel as though they're falling behind even before they've done anything. You aren't keeping up with the world in which you live, and how could you? What puts us at ease is a single image on a screen, or a single sentence, or blank piece of white paper with a single paragraph printed upon it. In many ways, flat minimalism gives us exactly what we want.
But this is not universally true. For example, look at the aesthetic of the Barnes Museum. Or the maximalism of Karl Lagerfeld’s library in Paris:
It's an open question to me as to whether user experience design is necessarily didactic and reductive or whether it can present an infinity of information to users in a useful manner. My equivalent would be that it overwhelms me to look up at the stars when I'm in the San Juan Islands because it makes me feel incredibly small but that that experience is informative and helpful to me as a human.
One step to addressing this design concern would be to "unflatten" web design. Parallax scrolling is good for this and I first remember it being employed with Mario Brothers, to make the mountains and clouds seem distant from the fast moving foreground. Even two parallax layers give a sense of depth but what about five? What about 50 layers? How many layers would it take (like frames a second) to fool human perception into feeling real time dimensions? Great examples include the FireWatch site, which includes 8 or more layers of parallax, and the Seattle Space Needle site, which starts at the bottom and scrolls upward, the opposite of almost every site, and ascends (appropriately) all the way into space.
Well, this doesn't get quite there but it is such a mind blowing way to show a comic book. Scrolling from left to right, the web comic Hobo Lobo of Hamelin usually employs at least four layers but sometimes more. Click this image and start scrolling through and you'll get a taste of what a website with depth can offer.
Another thing I think about often is that pages don't necessarily need to swipe down or automatically to the right. These are based on our assumptions of what it's like to read a book (in English) and means our online experience is often tethered to the limitations of reading a book. That's how most website work. But what if the pages were a 360 degree carousel, in which there were different options offered based on the direction you were "facing?"
An amazing online comic that plays with this concept is called Failing Sky. From a UX perspective, it's not easy or intuitive. The comic often asks you to break your preconceived notions of how to move through a website. Sometimes you have to scroll left or scroll up or you hit a dead end and have to scroll back only to discover that it's not the same image you scrolled away from. Usually, the author tricks you on purpose, knowing that you'll naturally want to scroll down or naturally scroll right. It makes UI seem like a video game and the experience of the images and story is richer for it. Click on the image to start the multi-directional story-telling.
