I blame the trend in UI design to hide scroll bars. On desktop they're perfectly visible and it's not so difficult to work out that you need to scroll.
The first slide is to blame, not the overall design. I scrolled from the get-go, but that's because I didn't engage with the "play" button on the first slide which seems like the only thing they want you to do. If there were no way to interact with something in that first slide, you'd scroll.
What the ... I didn't realize that till I read this post of yours even after playing all those clicking games. I thought since it's far away, may be they only have these animations here and someone shared it only because of them.
If your UI requires that users "be attentive" just to discover the content you're trying to convey, then your UI is awful and the user's failure to see it is entirely your fault.
Well said. I blame it partially on designer groupthink.
Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.
Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.
Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."
(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")
It used to be much worse with flashy microsites. You'd open them and wait minutes for the first page to load. Then click somewhere and wait again. And the UIs would be much more confusing. Scrollwheel would be disabled.
This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.
That’s a shame because selfishly I want everyone to see the second slide which is of the Racer game we unveiled at last year’s I/O. Was a proud moment for us code-play folk ;) http://www.chrome.com/racer
It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/
When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.
Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.
IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.
If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.
The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough. It'll be interesting to see if there is a giveaway at all this year, since a large part of previous woes could be down to people attending just for that, and I'd cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.
The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.
If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.
>"The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough."
I'm curious, what kind of demographic imbalances?
Of all the better known conferences, material from I/O has routinely been the most interesting to me - I've gone through dozens of videos from years past on YouTube. I've been thinking about pushing to get some employer sponsorship for a trip to I/O one year in place of our typical trips.
The presentations and material are great but there are a lot of attendees there who are not developers which makes a lot of the interactions confusing. TBH if there were more developers there I'm not sure I would be been able to get a seat or stand for that matter at a lot of the technical presentations.
Every stereotype of the tech industry being a male dominated monoculture was reinforced. Very (very) few women, and general racial/ethnic imbalances not reflective of Google or the wider world.
As I alluded to, I'd recommend going primarily if you think you'll get value from interacting with interesting people there. I'm big on Android, but my highlight of last year was chatting to a Chrome dev relations guy about their approach to profiling, so it is the pleasant surprises that are the main takeaways.
How is Google supposed to address that? And why is it relevant to getting value from the conference?
The few female developers I know tend to resent the fact that the only women they meet at conferences are marketers, thereby ruining the chances other attendees will treat them as developers. It does not help developers to invite more marketers or recruiters in order to achieve gender balance.
The question is: who on earth cares about the demographics of a conference? You go there to get information, so why should you care about who the people sitting in the hall are, especially given the fact that you won't see them ever again?
I believe the thinking is that the previous setup meant that most people there were the kind that would obsessively refresh windows in order to secure places. The lottery means there's no benefit to those possibly excessively enthused about the idea, and so the tone of the whole thing could be more balanced and professional.
They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.
> They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.
Is this no different to selling out in minutes though? Besides, hotels already know a) the dates of Google IO, and b) how many people are attending, so you'd imagine they'd already have priced that into their rates. Unless you're talking about the actual booking systems going offline, but that seems unlikely as lots of people will use aggregators (Expedia, Kayak, etc) at scale.
Perhaps the parent objects to hellbanning on principle, and is partaking in some small amount of civil disobedience to right a perceived wrong.
If a single post happened to result in my being hellbanned, I would surely hope someone would tell me so I didn't continue wasting my time trying to participate, only to have it sent into the void. I could instead use it as a signal to either move on, or do some self introspection about my actions which resulted in the ban in the first place.
In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically-generated programming challenge so non-programmers can't search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.
There are a large number of developers that still ask me "How do you do <simple thinghere> in regex?" quite often. I think that your suggestion may be narrowing the crowd a bit much.
Any big announcements rumored for this year's I/O, e.g. Android 5.0, Nexus 6 phone, 12" tablet, more offline services (Maps, Docs, etc.)?
I tried a couple of times to get in, failed, and resigned myself to watching the presentations and tutorials online for free. That's fine. Say what you will, Google gives away a lot of knowledge for free and I have benefited greatly.
There won't be a Nexus phone, those are announced at the end of the year usually. No one is expecting 5.0, though they usually do release a partial update every six months (maybe another KitKat, like the three JellyBean releases).
They do this across all their services and had been doing so for years. They really want you to use their (shitty) browser. I don't blame them though, it's just irritating to see people praise them as a "good" corporation that does no unnecessary evil.
Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees ("Ions") before the general public gets access.
As an Ion, there's incentive to go every year if only to maintain your ability to go next year (nevermind interacting with the Googlers who build the APIs you rely or the hardware seeding, clearly also benefits).
Personally, I'm glad they switched to the lottery. I had the worst experience last year. Got a ticket after refreshing the page for a half hour, but then Google Wallet was broken so it wouldn't let me pay for it (cart expires in 5 minutes). Hopefully they can handle the server load spread out over 2 days this time.
I'm fascinated by the dotted countdown clock at the bottom of the page. It took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and I got lost in Wikipedia reading about how braille is represented in unicode, thinking it had something to do with that.
My guess is that the first set in dark blue is days remaining, followed by hours in purple, minutes in green, and seconds in light blue. Haven't quite wrapped my head around which dot represents what value, but it sure does look cool.
days do not have an upper bound; therefore you see 8bits on the most left position. Hours can be at most 24, so 7th bit is not present, minutes&seconds can be at most 60 so 8th bit is not present etc...
boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"
boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"
boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."
boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"
exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan"
exo2: "Call me V'Ger"
exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."
exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"
exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"
exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"
exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"
exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"
exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"
exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"
exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"
exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"
exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"
exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"
exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"
exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"
exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"
exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"
exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"
exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"
exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"
neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°）╯"
Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.
The thing I first paid attention to was that there is no longer a mad dash to sign up in the first 10 seconds, but they pick people at random from those who apply in the first 2 days. I might actually make it for once!
I predict we will now see greater adoption on google wallet, since having a bunch of google wallets with virtual credit card numbers effectively gives you more tickets to the lottery. Sneaky plot by google there.
You could see that you can scroll down to page from the beginning but i somehow expected the animation to take me to those information below step by step. But instead animation started from the beginning again.
That's actually not true, it depends on what country you're from. By default, you need a visa to enter the US, even for short visits. However, if you're from one of the countries on this page, then the visa requirement is waived for visits < 90 days:
wow, I clearly should have rephrased that. I actually didn't have any idea what I was talking about and was curious to find out more. I see now that I wrote that all wrong, the question didn't sound like a question.
Actually I do expect a certain degree of privacy while in public. No everyone is comfortable with Google spying and data mining everything they can get their hands on.
DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED TO GET THE MOBILE PAGE TO APPEAR WITHOUT A TOOLBAR IN MOBILE SAFARI??? Wow. I have never seen this. I want to be able to do it also.
The screen starts off with the browser controls already minimized, even when the page hasn't scrolled yet.
Also when you scroll down, the bottom toolbar never appears, and it doesn't have the typical problem of showing the toolbar when you tap on the bottom part of the screen. How do they pull this off?
EDIT: I looked at the page. Is it this?
<meta content="minimal-ui" name="viewport">
I hate this trend in web design.