Being judgmental about the UX is fair in this case since it is a site about UX.
Quite frankly, it has a terrible UX. It took me three visits to understand what you meant by access to the explanation. I could only find a bunch of uninformative slides and a blurb promoting a book on the first visit two visits. On visit number three, I found the explanations.
Why?
I originally interpreted the scrolling indicator as an advance to next slide button. When I clicked on the button it presented the new slide and the advance button disappeared, so I further explored the site by clicking on the learn more button. That presented another uninformative slide so I ignored the advance button. After all, why would I want to repeat an action that failed to produce the desired result the last time I did it? Noticing the next link, I clicked on that in hopes that it would produce a more desirable result. Unfortunately, it produced the same sort of result as the advance button. At that point, I just gave up and clicked on the Info button and saw the blurb promoting the book. I tried clicking on the links to the left, saw the uninformative slides, and concluded that it was a gawd awful promotion for a book that included nothing but chapter headings.
Those were my first two visits. On visit three, convinced that there must be something more, I actually tried the advance button on the right slide and discovered that it was a scroll indicator. By that point, I was already so frustrated with the experience that I just gave up on the site without seeing what the creator had to say.
As for the graphics style, sure it's great. On the other hand, taking the minimalist presentation too far produced a site that was more difficult to interpret.
Edit: trying to keep terminology consistent as my understanding of the site evolved.
>> ... a long scroll of 20 ... blocks and titles none of which mean anything on their own
> frankly, it has a terrible UX
I don't follow these critiques. The content and navigation of the site is quite clear to me. The trackpad/wheel scrolling stutters very slightly in FireFox on Windows.
I opened this site on mobile. The blocks are half as high as the titles, making them impossible to read. Clicking a block took me through soms slow animation, which always ended with some graphic growing into view, in the same colour as the text, overlapping with the first paragraph of text...
The problem that I ran into was the lack of clear visual cues that you are supposed to scroll, which is why I was referring to everything as slides. I simply clicked on the things that it looked like you were supposed to click on. If you approach the site in that way, you miss out on virtually all of the content.
In a way, I should know better. I landed on a news article earlier in the day that started with one of those dynamic infographics that you interact with through scrolling. I was at the point of backing out of the page, concluding that the article was the infographic, when a hint of an actual article popped up on the screen. While it is a visually, I also find it a very annoying waste of time when I am trying to find information.
(Incidentally, I didn't run into the performance issues that others have been mentioning even though I was using an 8 year old computer.)
Quite frankly, it has a terrible UX. It took me three visits to understand what you meant by access to the explanation. I could only find a bunch of uninformative slides and a blurb promoting a book on the first visit two visits. On visit number three, I found the explanations.
Why?
I originally interpreted the scrolling indicator as an advance to next slide button. When I clicked on the button it presented the new slide and the advance button disappeared, so I further explored the site by clicking on the learn more button. That presented another uninformative slide so I ignored the advance button. After all, why would I want to repeat an action that failed to produce the desired result the last time I did it? Noticing the next link, I clicked on that in hopes that it would produce a more desirable result. Unfortunately, it produced the same sort of result as the advance button. At that point, I just gave up and clicked on the Info button and saw the blurb promoting the book. I tried clicking on the links to the left, saw the uninformative slides, and concluded that it was a gawd awful promotion for a book that included nothing but chapter headings.
Those were my first two visits. On visit three, convinced that there must be something more, I actually tried the advance button on the right slide and discovered that it was a scroll indicator. By that point, I was already so frustrated with the experience that I just gave up on the site without seeing what the creator had to say.
As for the graphics style, sure it's great. On the other hand, taking the minimalist presentation too far produced a site that was more difficult to interpret.
Edit: trying to keep terminology consistent as my understanding of the site evolved.