Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

There is a terrible trend among designers to start doing motion design for mobile apps way too early.

Before even the app's purpose is properly conceptualized, someone digs up one of those great new animation-oriented prototyping tools and starts making flipping buttons and sliding blocks like the ones shown in the original post. "This is going to be our app's unique personality!"

That effort can end up being misspent and misleading if it's done before proper prototyping. Having ultra-polished animations in mockups will guide development towards implementing those rather than asking questions about what users might want to do.

The article refers to Facebook's Paper app: "Can you imagine Facebook designers presenting their iOS Paper app as a static layout? It would look pretty lame."

Ironically, Paper has been discontinued and the Facebook Creative Labs group that created it has been disbanded. Turns out that awesome animations didn't give the app a purpose of its own.

That's just how the design industry is. You could say the same thing for almost all forms of design:

There is a terrible trend among designers to start doing visual design too early.

There is a terrible trend among designers to start doing typography too early.

There is a terrible trend among designers to start doing UI design too early.

The cold truth that designers don't want to admit is that most companies never even reach the stage where graphic design matters. It is almost entirely done to appease the fetishes of early adopters. Look at Craigslist. Look at Amazon. Look at Flappy Bird.

The thing is, the kind of design companies actually need: which is Capital D, integrated, cross-disclipline Design, most professional designers don't actually know how to do. They know how to push words and pictures around around in an image file. They know how to conduct a brainstorming session. If you're lucky they know how to do usability testing. And if you're really lucky they know how to think like a user. But they don't know how to move in a principled way through all of the domains of production at their company and articulate a vision for how design practices can be dispatched to advance their goals.

And the subset of designers who do know how to do that, are generally so disenfranchised within their organization that they are fought every step of the way until they give in and just make pretty mockups because that's what their coworkers want.

This is what I was thinking. Fluid UI is a nice-to-have. Sure it has value, but unless the UI is the product, the core functionality is always going to be a higher priority. That said, good UX is not something that can simply be bolted on after those core functions are tweaked. The application flow should be part of the early designs, with the intention to add the UX perfections in a subsequent iteration. The hard part is deciding when it is good enough for release.

Motion is the the bass player in the band. You shouldn't notice them but when they're gone something definitely doesn't feel right.

All interfaces already have motion without needing animations. If I click "minimize" and something disappears, then it obviously minimized. I don't need a timewasting animation telling me that.

I used to think this but now I honestly think that "pleasing" animations (fades, transitions) improve my mood. Also, sometimes the buttons are not very descriptive (like 3 different colored dots) so the animation can be helpful by showing you what happened with an animation.

Actually, I think you do. Maybe the app crashed without saving your data. Maybe you hit a button or pressed a key by accident without realizing what it did, and now all your precious work seems to be gone and you don’t know where it went or why.

Not all feedback is automatically bad.

The trick is to get rid of animations that force the user to wait for them (e.g. most “opening” animations are in this category; I do not want to wait for something to finish sliding open before I can use it, I want items to appear instantly).

In that case the correct solution is fixing the app so it doesn't crash, and fixing the input device so it doesn't generate spurious inputs. The Unix style of silence on success is the best feedback, because it means I can mentally queue multiple actions without being interrupted.

If it's an unfamiliar system, it may not be clear where it has been minimized. I can spare 0.2 seconds in exchange for a quick reminder of how to "unminimize" it.

It's only an unfamiliar system once. I'll accept animations as a tutorial mode if they can be turned off when they're no longer useful. I won't accept an additional 200ms of unnecessary latency every time. That's more that enough to feel like an interruption, so the harm as far more than the cumulative time wasted.

I always turn off as many OS-level and app animations I can. I hate the unnecessary delay and overall feeling of slowness that having to sit through animations creates. Even in games I often wish for a speed-mode that would reduce or remove all but the most necessary animations (especially in older games).

I come from a KDE background, but I find a noticable difference in user engagement when window resizing / minimizing / creation is not animated. The default animation moves minimized windows to its spot on the taskbar / dock, which gives a lot of useful context to users who would otherwise get lost.

Paper probably was discounted due to some business reasons - but it still was (and probably is) the best app created for iOS, in my opinion. Animations smoothness was just gorgeous and also really pleasant and intuitive to use.

There is also a terrible trend among "designrs" to leave out the "e" before the "r" at the end of their domain name.

Completely agree, it's premature optimisation!

Design is how it works, any designer working on motion design early in the lifecycle of a new product, to the detriment of focus on say, utility aren't designing. They're playing.

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