Very functional and smooth, this is a great use of an inflated technique..

Thanks for sharing

I found this dizzying. News sites in general don't have very strong hierarchy; if you compare the front page of a newspaper in print to the same publication's presence online you'd find that the online version always crams more in--to the detriment of the user experience, IMO. Front pages and magazine covers are pretty focused experiences; news website are not.

I think the parallax effect, while pretty and smooth, calls quite a bit of attention to itself and keeps me from consuming the main block of content--which is generally considered to be the most important content. Any time you break a pattern, you tell users something is special. Since only a slim part of the page gets the parallax treatment, that content becomes elevated in hierarchy. Since this content is summary content, the pattern is misapplied here. I'm not sure what advantages this approach offers over more common patterns, but the downsides seem very obvious indeed.

There may be something worth exploring in this scrolling pattern, but I certainly hope it is not implemented elsewhere as it is on this site.

Edit: for clarity

I love Bloomberg.

I think it's important to remember that Bloomberg's audience is used to information overload; many financial analysts are glued to their Bloomberg Terminal all day:

we designers are biaised anyways, I'd like to see reactions from non-tech, non-designers…why not their target audience actually! Thanks for your remarks. It's not a clear win for sure. Worth exploring? Definitely.

Is it parallax scrolling if there's no parallax effect? Serious question, I'm not sure anymore. Everyone calls all non-standard scrolling effects parallax.

I found it distracting. It was hard to focus on either the sidebar or the body when they scrolled out of sync. But I wouldn't rule it out as something worth exploring a bit more.

Definitely well done. Great if you don't know if two columns will have equal height.

I don't see any difference

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Good idea!

If you scroll slow enough it allows you to see information in both columns. You can read the left then the right, then back again.

That being said, if you just want to scroll down at normal speed, its very distracting/disruptive.

I find this works quite well for a couple reasons.

First, it's appropriate for the brand and the type of content. It ends up looking like a news ticker, analogous to the types in NYC and Times Square that are all scrolling by at different speeds, based on how important they are or how quickly you need to consume them.

Second, it actually calls attention to sidebar in a subtle but clear way, which makes a pane of content (good content—not ads or useless fluff) more discoverable and useful because it's moving at a slightly unexpected pace. It could be distracting when trying to read the content in the center, but it turns out it's not—when reading content, I'm generally not scrolling. All is well.

Overall, highly creative and unique. An excellent UX device. I'll say, don't copy this exactly necessarily, but think of the process they must have used: what analogies could you take from your industry that could be subtly integrated into the UX to call attention to content and context effectively, and make users nostalgic for older versions of UIs in your space? That's an opportunity for some honest delight.

This is a cool use of parallax scrolling. The result for me, however, was dizziness.

It's a great way to balance between the side bar and the main content. But isn't that scrolling too fast for the user to perceive anything?

Yes it's very creative to use limited areas. I'll use this idea for my future projects.