Top Bar animations on railway.com are obnoxious and distracting to the human eye

okarmazin
PRO

a month ago

The unintuitive left-right translations when mousing over the top bar categories (Products, Developers, Resources...) on railway.com are obnoxious, distracting, confusing and cause a large amount of cognitive load.

Remember a few years ago when all web pages detected mouse leaving the web page to close the tab, and displaying obnoxious jarring popups to catch your attention at all costs? The animations on railway.com resemble those times.

The horizontal animations break human hand-eye-brain coordination and make visitors think about "wtf just happened" - the devil of UX.

Mama din't raise no thinkers, don't make me think when I'm navigating dropdowns.

Under Review

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okarmazin
PRO

a month ago

I suspect the problem here stems mainly from the fact that your cursor moves in the opposite direction of the animation. Your brain moves your hand and eye to the right to mouse over the next category. You expect new content to appear at your cursor. Your eye is focused there. Unexpectedly, Railway displays content to the far right and moves it left towards your cursor. This breaks your expectations about where new content will appear and makes you think, resulting in jarring animations.