I am a UX/UI guy, and I wish it would be used properly. What a lot of parallax sites like to do is mess with the scrolling of the page. ("Scrolljacking" is a term I've thrown around for stuff like this.)
Don't do that. Ever.
The user should always be able to scroll normally and not have their browser screen clunking along because they're not scrolling at a speed that is optimal for the animations at hand.
Here's a decently bad offender for a visual of what I'm talking about: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ (After the initial animation, try scrolling down--it's not as easy as scrolling should be.)
An example of Apple doing parallax right is the new iMac page:
http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/
At least the top image effect is very well done IMO and does a very good job conveying the central premise of the new iMac: looottts of pixels.
Having said that I really dislike what happens lower on the page where the iMac image stays pinned on the left and the descriptions scroll normally on the right. It's totally jarring to me. It seems unnatural that some of the contents would move with the scrollbar (as expected) and other significant elements would not. It immediately pulls me away from the content and leaves me trying to analyze what in the world is going on.
We experience parallax in the real world every day and are completely wired up to find it normal and expected. But real parallax involves objects at different distances. When you force objects that are in the same plane to move as if they were in different planes, you get the "funhouse" effect.
I suspect that like many other cute effects somebody will eventually do some serious AB tests and figure out that this kind of thing reduces conversions.
The pinning is actually buggy: it pins the Mac to the wrong vertical offset when you scroll past the threshold the pin hits. At least on Chrome on my Macbook Air it does, anyway. Maybe it works correctly at other resolutions or browsers.
So not really "parallax right" if you're counting the whole page from top to bottom. I like the images a lot though, they're very nice.
I actually think this was terrible as well. I clicked the link on the release date because I was curious. I scrolled for a while, and I thought I was somehow just zooming out. It clunked along and took a while to get to any information. It felt poor. The animation was not fluid. Maybe it should have been a screen sized gif, that played over 4 seconds and then disappeared. Not sure, but it felt like I had no control over the page as a user. I couldn't scroll away.
That's not a great example either. I can't grab the scroll bar and go to the top or bottom of the page since they have their own custom scroll bar that doesn't work like it should. Also Page Up and Page Down don't work.
It is especially terrible, if you use your mouse wheel to scroll and not a swiping gesture on a trackpad. Parallax just looks horribly with a mouse wheel.
It's open to abuse (hiding content until it's scrolled to, usually) but the actual visual idea of it is fine, as far as I'm concerned. Just don't try to communicate the main purpose of your page with it.
I second that motion, bring it behind the barn and take it out of it`s misery. Especially when the scrolling pops up some unexpected graphic which is jarring and doesn't bring anything to the site`s aesthetic or UX.
That's because it is simply done. For the most part the only thing that really happens in a big way is that the background changes out based on scroll position. Any other element that animates on scroll does so in a minor and subtle way. The actual scrolling of the page is not altered in any way.
I agree, this is one of the better ways to handle such things if it has to be done.
I tried to buy a theme from themeforest and it's extremely hard to fine one that is NOT completely polluted with CSS animations and parallax effects. I wish you were right, but just from the top-selling themes of marketplaces like themeforest, it seems that the trend is still quite big, unfortunately.
Works OK on Firefox OS. The base layer scrolls perfectly, but the other ones update at a lower framerate. Desktop Firefox has the same behavior when APZ is enabled.
I didn't notice the effect until I scrolled back up and saw a jerky movement in the buildings. Then tried scrolling back down and up not getting it to work until I noticed it moved with the mouse movement not the scrolling.
You've created a nice showpiece. However, it's still a horrible design trend, and it's probably the work user experience element I've seen used in recent years. This is the equivalent of the animated gifs of the 90's. Under construction and dancing baby being the most common. Adding distraction rather than focusing on content has never been a successful strategy, and I hope it never does.
It will course correct eventually. I'm hoping sooner.
Using this while developing my website. It works pretty well, although seems to have issues on various browsers (like Safari) where there is no scrolling.
The main issue I had was that smooth scrolling libraries (for jumping to various places on the same page) didn't work until I referenced the element to scroll as a specific div (that contained all of my parallax) instead of "body" or "html, body" like suggested online.
Overall, I like the flexibility and the ability to inspect the layers using simple translations and rotations.
I'm not a UX/UI guy, but it feels like terrible UX/UI.