There are essentially two established ways to use zooming in web interfaces today. They serve different purposes and make different tradeoffs. I built a third one, so I'll try to be fair about what each does well and where it falls short.
* Prezi Prezi pioneered the zooming canvas for presentations and remains the market leader in that space. It recently added AI-powered generation and text editing tools. It's a polished product with real traction.
But Prezi is a closed platform, not a library. You can't use its zoom engine in your own app. Pricing starts at $15/month for meaningful features, and exporting to PowerPoint flattens all zoom effects into static slides. A recurring complaint from users is that the zooming and panning transitions cause motion sickness. And fundamentally, Prezi uses zoom as a storytelling device between pre-arranged frames. It's not a navigation model. It's a presentation model.
* impress.js impress.js brought Prezi-like zooming to the open web. It's a presentation framework based on CSS3 transforms and transitions, directly inspired by Prezi. It was genuinely groundbreaking when it launched. Its architecture is step-based: you position "steps" in 3D space and the camera moves between them. That's great for presentations, but it doesn't help you build an app where users navigate by zooming into content. impress.js has no concept of dynamically mounting views, managing zoom depth, or handling navigation state. It's a slide deck engine with a zoom trick.
* Zumly This is what I built. Full disclosure: I'm the sole developer. The idea is offering an alternative to traditional page navigation using zooming. You mark an element as zoomable, point it to a view, and Zumly handles the transition and inserts new views. That's basically it.
I started Zumly in 2020 after leaving behind Zircle UI (a Vue zooming library), trying to take what I learned further. Framework-agnostic, focused just on the zoom part. Since then I've rewritten the engine several times, changed the approach more than once. Only now I'm actually happy with how it feels.
Views are dynamically mounted and unmounted during zoom transitions. In impress.js, all steps exist in the DOM simultaneously. In Zumly, you zoom into a trigger element, and the target view gets injected and scaled into place. This is closer to how routing works in SPAs than to how slide decks work.
The landing page is built with Zumly itself so you can get the feel before touching any code.
Curious if anyone else has thought about this space. What makes zooming UIs work or fail?
Landing page (built with Zumly): https://zumerlab.github.io/zumly
GitHub: https://github.com/zumerlab/zumly
13 comments
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.
I really love this (and miss the days when Prezi was simple and straightforward).
I've written an app myself along sort-of similar lines, but it's less a presentation app and more a thought organizer (works on all Apple platforms). https://mindscopeapp.com
I think what proved key for my own "zoomable" UI was cross-linking, search, and speed/snappiness. Make the animations too heavy and it just slows you down. Zumly seems really great in this regard. Well done!
Interesting way to use zooming as a way to transition deeper into sub-dashboards. The navigation from "Mission Control" -> "Satellite" -> "Subsystem" feels oddly intuitive and fun. I would maybe opt for keeping a consistent navbar/sidebar, to support out-of-zoom navigation. And if we are dealing with a lot of power-users some breadcrumb to quickly go back to any zoom-level. But overall, i think this could totally work.
I think zooming is effective when it's used in isolation for discrete things. It does add a sense of delight, but there is a functional usefulness of this that I'm trying to wrap my head around.. perhaps a transition effect for an immersive demo, etc.. nice work.
I'd say this is more of an interesting take on page transitions. I was expecting mouse wheel scroll to zoom, so I instinctively scrolled expecting some kind of zooming effect.
I remembered there was a website featured here on HN that had an interactive tour of the scale of the universe ranging from the very microscopic world (if I remember correctly I think it even went down to Planck length) all the way to the macroscopic (black holes, galaxies). I'd be interested in such a zooming library that achieves something like that.
This looks seriously impressive. Also, I wonder what the a11y implications are. I don't miss Macromedia Flash hell at all. This is HTML5, so with a bit of effort it could look beautiful and still cater to the visually impaired.
Edit: I can't scroll any of the showcases. Probably deliberate, but a cut-off UI can be annoying.
Edit2: I opened the yellow car on the production line and going back the page got all offscreen and looks messed up
The Home Assistant showcase looks fabulous.
Interesting. At one point I pinched my iPad to zoom out of habit and it got very confused. But yea, interesting.
Would suggest using history-api navigation over the hash based routing.
I have great respect for people pursuing their special interests with such perseverance - you clearly care about zooming UIs.
And so do I (just to a lesser extent)! It’s a great way to express hierarchy.
One thing I encountered is that it becomes all buggy after using the slide-back navigation gesture in iOS Safari. Yet this being natively handles would be a really cool thing to me, like those iOS “close back to thumbnail” gestures you sometimes see when scrolling up/down that I haven’t really seen replicated anywhere else.
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.
Weird, seems to work fine in Firefox on Android.
I have the exactly opposite view, possibly with the same amount of conviction. It feels very necessary to communicate hierarchy and where things are coming from and going. It communicates a lot of important information and continuity. In real life, you don’t have things suddenly appearing and disappearing all the time. That’s not how our brains are conditioned.