Comment by pipio21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pipio21 | Hacker News Reader

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IMHO good animations are good design. Apple does a great job here. They display the minimum animation necessary for you to understand. You open an app and you see it opening.

Text terminals are terrible for something I need to do every single day: Showing others what I am doing on the computer.

Without animations you are like a person with autism disorder: It works for you but nobody that is watching you can understand what you are doing, you are in your world. You do a key combination you know(but others do not) and the screen changes instantly.

Repeat this a few times and you have a lot of confused people in your audience.

I agree that we need everything: something extremely fast, intuitive while beautiful and useful and extremely easy(and cheap and fast) to program.

But nobody has done it because it is hard as playing violin to be able to design a simple design alone, let alone make it fast. In the real world you need to pick your priorities, to constantly triage and make decisions.

Having animations 100% of the time to help with 1% use case of having an audience (if it even helps, I seriously doubt it) is horrible design. I also doubt that's the reason Apple had for putting them in, designers need to do something to prove they're useful so they add useless little bits of eye candy that really just slow everyone down.

Animations aren't just useful for when you have an audience. They convey a sense of space that's important to help the user orient themselves within the operating system. Things instantly appearing and disappearing is jarring, and you can easily lose your place unless you maintain an internal model of how everything works. Remember, Apple is laser-focused on user experience, and subtle animations are a part of that. Users have a hundred other things to do and the applications they use should be as low of a cognitive burden as possible.

I agree animation can help get oriented with a new system but they quickly get in the way. Some people even like having animations just because of the feel of it and that's fine too. I don't mind UI having the animations as an option, even if it's on by default, I just want a big, fat single button to turn them all off.

Side note: I expected to be downvoted heavily for my original comment given the bad tone (animations are a sore spot for me, I get emotional about it) but some how the opposite happened. Obviously I was 100% correct :) but I should have been less of a dick about it.

If only they were subtle. Sure. We can compromise between hardcore austere tech-nerd interface and Fisher Price my-first-GUI.

That's Windows, isn't it? :P

> IMHO good animations are good design. Apple does a great job here.

I used to sit next to my boss at a previous job, when I was first hired, so she could show me the ropes. She used a Mac.

Sometimes she'd get mail, but because she was working with me, she wouldn't answer it. And the icon would bounce up and down and bleet, over and over. Microsoft had Clippy, and Apple has Claptrap.

You can mouse over the icon to get it to stop. Took a while before I realized that, not sure how to make it more obvious though.

That's still annoying. It should bounce a couple of times and then just stop.

I've found it easier to communicate with people about what I'm doing in a terminal because most things are just command strings that you enter and very few applications actually have interactive GUIs that need to be explained (or learned.)

That's a good point. I think there is necessary and unnecessary animations. The 1password animation mentioned in the article is absolutely unnecessary. Animations should only be used to help the user understand what is happening and they should be fast. There's no reason why a user should wait for an animation to continue doing what they intended to do.

I think a useful way to accomplish a nice compromise between beautiful interfaces and usability is to allow the user to skip animations. For example, if I start typing after an action was performed the animation should skip to the end. In this case the user is clearly familiar with the interface and knows what they want to do next.

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