I've noticed a recent surge in websites—especially promotional pages shared on social platforms—that rely heavily on scroll-triggered animations and scroll hijacking. I can appreciate motion when it supports the content, but some sites make you scroll through a minute or more of parallax effects and staged transitions before you can reach a product or checkout button. Is this mostly the result of AI-assisted development, design trends, or something else?
4 Answers
AI-assisted development has probably amplified the trend, but excessive animation was common long before that. Templates, visual site builders, and design showcases have made scroll triggers easy to add, so inexperienced developers and marketers often treat them as a requirement. When every section has motion, the site feels slower instead of more memorable.
The trend is partly about trying to look distinctive. Creative showcases and polished templates reward dramatic visual effects, and AI tools make it much easier for almost anyone to reproduce that style. I wouldn’t be surprised if simple, fast, restrained websites become more appealing as people get tired of waiting through elaborate transitions just to find a button.
There’s a meaningful difference between scroll animation and scroll hijacking. Animation can react to normal scrolling without changing how the wheel, trackpad, keyboard, or scrollbar behaves. Hijacking delays or remaps the user’s input, which makes navigation unpredictable and can create accessibility problems. A good test is whether the main action is easy to reach with keyboard navigation and whether the page still works with reduced motion enabled.
A lot of designers confuse motion with personality. They want the site to stand out, then add parallax, 3D effects, animated text, and scroll-controlled transitions until the basic task becomes frustrating. The irony is that clients often dislike the result once they actually try using it, especially on mobile.
Exactly. Scroll-based storytelling can be great when the page still behaves normally and the animation supports the content. The problem is making users fight the interface just to move down the page.