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Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#41

Post by justinc8687 »

As someone who suffers from vestibular migraines, unfortunately visiting the demo site instantly made get dizzy. I highly encourage you to implement the "@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)" media query to handle accessibility [1]. I'd hopefully expect the zooms to turn into normal links or failing that, either slow down or have some kind of non-vestibular-attack-inducing flow.

Here are some other good resources: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/understanding-vestibular-d... or https://web.dev/articles/prefers-reduced-motion

I don't say this as criticism as I'm sure you've never heard of these issues before, but something I'd encourage you (or anyone who relies on animations) to implement into their package.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#42

Post by handfuloflight »

tinchox6 wrote: post #25
lateforwork wrote: post #13

Love it. But there is a significant usability issue: Lack of signifier (aka affordance). How do I known when something is zoomable? Because there is no signifier, I am frequently disappointed when I click on something and it turns out it is not zoomable.

Fair point. No visual cue for what's zoomable is a real gap. Thinking about how to handle that without cluttering the UI.

Maybe an icon on hover or a small static icon but the latter could get repetitive, the hover would solve the repetition.

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#43

Post by jareklupinski »

very well made :) for documentation and specific dashboards this has a lot of great uses

i played with a similar concept back when everyone was starting to 'drill down into big data' on their ipads, and i never came up with a clever way of drilling 'sideways', or allowing people to go between one 'insight' from one deep level and tie it into another without zooming all the way back out and then back in, contextual 'wormholes' (all handmade), or breadcrumbs (messy after enough layers)

one thing i'd add to the demo is detecting where i'm hovering over while scrolling to scroll into that part (on a mouse), scroll out works

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#44

Post by tinchox6 »

justinc8687 wrote: post #41

As someone who suffers from vestibular migraines, unfortunately visiting the demo site instantly made get dizzy. I highly encourage you to implement the "@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)" media query to handle accessibility [1]. I'd hopefully expect the zooms to turn into normal links or failing that, either slow down or have some kind of non-vestibular-attack-inducing flow. Here are some other good resources:…

You can use driver none to avoid transitions. And I’m working on reduce motion

Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#45

Post by 8organicbits »

justinc8687 wrote: post #41

As someone who suffers from vestibular migraines, unfortunately visiting the demo site instantly made get dizzy. I highly encourage you to implement the "@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)" media query to handle accessibility [1]. I'd hopefully expect the zooms to turn into normal links or failing that, either slow down or have some kind of non-vestibular-attack-inducing flow. Here are some other good resources:…

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Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#47

Post by heyethan »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #6

Doesn't work correctly in Firefox. Feels sluggish, but maybe this could be fixed by reducing the transition time. But why? People usually don't notice such transition effects and it doesn't affect user experience in any meaningful positive way. It feels absolutely unnecessary. Maybe you could re-use it as a mod for some game engine. This feels appropriate for video games; not for web-sites.

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Re: Zooming UIs in 2026: Prezi, impress.js, and why I built something different

#48

Post by DrScientist »

Has anybody built a UI around the opposite? Shrinking?

ie rather that zooming in on the content of interest, shrinking the content not of interest?

Long time ago I used to use https://www.windowmaker.org/ as my X11 window manager and one of the features I really liked was the ability to shrink a window to an icon and place that icon on the desktop for future retrieval ( a bit like having the whole desktop like the MacOS dock ).

I find such an interface easier to navigate than one where you zoom in and out - where the it's too easy to lose overall context, and where navigation is a bit too linear/hierarchical.

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