iOS designers: What is it with all the motion lately? | Hacker News Reader

iOS designers: What is it with all the motion lately?

herbsutter.com

54 pointstobiasrenger59 comments

To me, the greatest inconvenience of iOS 11 is the keyboard lag on the iPad. I really don't know what happened, but it made the OS completely unusable on an iPad Air. For a damn keyboard. I tried turning some autocomplete options off, but it didn't change a lot.

I'm the author of a B2B app running on iPad only, but those kind of things makes me really think about going cross-platform for my next major release. I don't see myself recommending my (pro) users a platform where an OS release makes typing text in a text field unusable.

iOS's keyboard is the worst thing about the entire platform IMO. The first thing I do on any new device is replace it with the Google Keyboard. Text entry is one area where Android really outshines iOS.

This is clearly a matter of preference. After using the iOS keyboard for years, I hate typing on Android.

"on Android" is rather vague - which keyboard?

The input lag on all androids, and really all keyboards I've tried, is horrible and doesn't seem to exist on ios. I mean, it's probably not zero on ios either, but it's much less.

And "upgraded" androids are much worse : you select a textfield, takes seconds to place a cursor in it, and multiple seconds to reflow the screen and show the keyboard.

I get no lag at all on my Pixel XL. Typing on that phone is way more pleasant and ergonomic than it is on my iPhone and a lot of the features like autocomplete work better, especially in a multilingual setting.

Are you peck typing on Android? Sometimes that can be slow, but using Swype like typing is much faster even without lag.

I don't know which devices you have used, but that's simply not true in my experience.

Mind you, I have sworn off Samsung, since their TouchWiz has indeed been a laggy mess in the past. But in my experience over the years with HTC, Sony, Moto, or most recently Nokia, text input is fine. (And definitely less laggy than on my - admittedly old - iPad 3.)

Obviously it's a matter of preference, but I agree with the OP that the Google Keyboard (GBoard, it's on iOS) is far superior to the Apple keyboard. Unfortunately it's been a little unreliable since iOS 11 came out.

I regularly have issues with gboard where it won't accept the first 5-10 keypresses when I open it. It's especially bad within Google's own apps.

Speaking only from personal experience, the only thing about the stock Android keyboard that I prefer over the stock iOS keyboard is swipe typing. It's phenomenal. I've had plenty of issues just trying to get the actual key that I want to press on Android.

Again, personal experience only.

It's their way of making you upgrade to a 2017 model. Not an accident or a bug.

There's a famous quote :

"never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity"

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice

I developed and maintain an app for education with HTML5 interactive books. The app runs on Android, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, and iOS.

Of all the platforms, iOS is the only one causing problems with the webview and we are starting to seriously consider moving out of iOS in the next years since we can influence the device the schools/parents are buying.

For example we have one bug where the keyboard stops responding. Apparently this was solved in WKWebView, but we are forced to use the old UIWebView because of other bugs with WKWebView Apple hasn't solved.

The problem is everywhere now. I think the trend originated with ideas from Material Design. There is no aesthetic restraint with animation these days, and it's terrible for accessibility.

It's bleeding over into Windows 10 too, which I just noticed a few days ago when helping someone with his computer.

It's bleeding over into Firefox, where small UI elements that are not the main area of focus are starting to animate. Chrome is even worse with animation by "flashing" elements after the user's focus has already moved to other parts of the UI.

Animating nearly everything on a page is like putting 4 inches of frosting on top of a cake that is only 4 inches thick.

Designers should be thinking: how can I minimize animation so that it only serves its essential purpose: bringing attention to the current area of focus in the most inconspicuous way where there is no other way to make things clear. Only one part of the page should animate at a time, and it shouldn't animate after the user's focus has left that area. There shouldn't be a delay between a user's action and animation, because that can cause a kind of "animation shock" in people who have motion sensitivity. Don't create elements suddenly get shoved into a user's face at high speed, especially with "boingy" easings.

Consider whether people are reading your content or playing a game. If they are supposed to read something, minimize animation -- think: "how can I remove as much animation as possible?". If they are playing a game, animation is fine.

Parallax can be nauseating. I wanted to like Google Plus, but had to stop using it once the animation got out of control. I stopped using Trello for mobile because of it. I close a lot of websites due to the animation, and Android phones have become really hard to use.

- http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/

> Animating nearly everything on a page is like putting 4 inches of frosting on top of a cake that is only 4 inches thick.

I love this analogy. In my view, animation (in non-game apps) should be felt rather than seen. It should be used to soften sharp edges over time. It really bugs me for example when a dialog fades away or slides off the screen in an excruciatingly slow manner when I hit the "X".

It can be fun to play with CSS transitions, but it's a terrible idea to use them in practice in probably about 95% of cases. Animation is basically visual spam.

I recently saw one footer bar that would appear by dropping down from the top of the page after the user started scrolling. Then when the user clicked the X, the bar would slowly float up, then fall back down (off the screen) quickly. The situation has become completely absurd.

The worst thing about all these iOS animations is that they seem to have some sort of invisible animation frames after having (visibly) finished, blocking any user input for an additional couple hundred milliseconds even though nothing is (visibly) happening. Driving me nuts since iOS 7, even with "reduced motion" active. Same thing on the Apple Watch.

Yep, nail on the head.

You should never, ever throw away user input. All reasonable: Cut the anim short on input, respond during anim, buffer the input and respond after the anim. But whatever you do, don't just throw out the user input! It's a terrible experience when your phone ignores you. It feels buggy, and creates a sense of anxiety/hesitation when using your phone.

Apple used to be really good at this, but they lost the religion starting in 7...

Discussing whether the animations are worthwhile is a red herring.

The real issue is that iOS is not respecting the users choice to disable motion, and in cases where a user suffers from a motion intolerance, it's absurd they have no way to disable motion to meet their needs.

That's the problem though. The setting isn't "Disable Motion." It's "Reduce Motion." They're doing what they say on the tin, it's just that what is said on the tin is _extremely_ vague.

You make it sound like they're choosing to ignore the setting.

It's software... I'm pretty sure what's happening is a new feature gets built, with animation, and the team responsible forgets that there's a "reduce animation" setting that they should take into account.

I have an iOS app that has a disable animations setting and I frequently forget it exists. My app is a few million less lines of code and a couple thousand less engineers than iOS.

I totally agree, but I hold different standards for developers of apps than the developers of operating systems. I'd expect that at some point in the QA process software goes through an accessibility check, especially at a company like Apple.

I thought this comment was interesting:

>Back in the days of NeXT, Steve Jobs used to make developers use the least capable machine supported by the target product on which they worked. This kept developers “honest” and attentive to performance issues and hardware constraints. I think Apple could benefit from doing the same thing with iOS developers.

Can we get designers to do the same? Every designer I've seen has amazing monitors, so they design things with like a million shades of gray, which ends up looking completely washed out on people's 5 year old thinkpad.

My ultimate goal is apps for education which makes using a $100 piece of dirt Chromebook, which I'm typing on now, an attractive machine to use. I can develop with it using the Cloud9 cloud based IDE. It's not that bad if I connected to a TV for extra screen real estate. A month ago I learned something very important. The mouse cursor stopped showing, so the machine doesn't have a mouse or tack pad. Now I have to tab through web pages which have limited my usage to Hacker News, Google Music, and Netflix which accounts for 90% of the usage before it broke. I can't use it to bank or pay my bills, wikipedia, or Facebook. It really does make me as a web developer ask the question how can I make this better and make more of my products more accessible.

$100 piece of dirt chromebook + cloud services = $100 + $600 per year to actually use it.

Why not use a $200 secondhand lenovo that can actually run programs and give them a real system ?

When I was very small I actually got an intro to programming class on mainframe. You could only work while connected. It was horrible, since you could only do exactly what the teacher said, there was essentially no cpu capacity available (and if multiple 7 year olds who've never seen a program run before complained about it, it's bad).

It was beyond worthless. Stop the walled garden, especially for programmers.

My Samsung Chromebook is featherlight, lighter than my iPad. So it has replaced it as a PDF reader. An iPad-priced Chromebook with cell network support would be a dream purchase.

Something that can't store a PDF library locally just wouldn't cut it for me. I travel too much and internet just isn't guaranteed.

> It really does make me as a web developer ask the question how can I make this better and make more of my products more accessible.

Follow the Web original design HTML + CSS, limiting the actual use of JavaScript, which is why I am a big supporter of Web 1.0 style with MVC backends.

Sort of agree. There's value in having a great display as a designer, but a troublingly high percentages of designers will never test their colour choices on inferior or poorly-calibrated screens.

I'd also love for more designers to build websites that are still usable when the browser is only as large as half the screen at 1680x1050. I'm finding more and more websites either require horizontal scrolling or go into an iPad mode with huge fonts and hamburger menus.

Personally I think it's busy work. Lots of problems have been solved, but there's still lots of people to employ. And people without a problem to solve get antsy, feel bored, and move on to other departments or other companies entirely.

A software project without enough time, money, or staff wouldn't run into these problems. They'd certainly have their own problems, but graphical bloat wouldn't be one of them. Which is echoed by another comment here about Steve Jobs forcing designers to work on minimal spec machines.

I agree with the idea that it is busy work, but I think it is not so much a matter of the problems being solved as it is easier for everyone to focus on animation than on solving those problems. The hard problems are mostly at the layers above those where designers have authority (or input) and creating animations is satisfying because it is creative and the layers above designers get part of that satisfaction because they get to have input (or authority) over the final design product.

Yet, it is also the case that good design comes from making the problem more complicated than it seems at first glance. Even worse bad design can come from there or from a naive approach...which is to say that bad design is easy. What the article misses is that it is also ubiquitous.

The cottage industry of talking about bad design survives because complaining is easy. Looking at the average design and figuring out what it got right despite other possible shortcomings is hard and doesn't make for good blog posts. It is hard because it requires critique rather than criticism, empathy for design constraints, and judging works by a criteria other than "What I like."

Not to downplay these people's problems, but I found this post from 2013 (in a thread discussing these issues in iOS 7) interesting:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23184178#message231841...

"Motion sickness and dizziness are relatively common in the human population and statistics show that some 20% of population is affected. The two major causes are inner ear and/or visual oculor motor system.

People experiencing motion sickness in front of a small screen like a smartphone will also likely have same or bigger symptoms during other life situations: elevators, roofs, boats, reading in a car, watching a movie with a fast moving object, watching kids while they have fun in a carousel, etc. Other related symptoms might be photophobia (excess light sensitivity) causing to use sunglasses even in cloudy days, making a rapid head movement, difficulties in evaluating distances for example while parking a car, etc.

Unfortunately it is not a specific technology, it is the inability of some people to meet the requirements of some environment situations.

I would suggest to investigate with a clinical evaluation by an otorhinolaryngologist (specialized in vestibular disorders) and an optometrist (specialized in vision therapy).

I have seen and treated a huge number of people with motion sickness disorders and the treatment is relatively easy allowing a more enjoyable life not just watching a smartphone screen but also in many other life situations."

> I have seen and treated a huge number of people with motion sickness disorders and the treatment is relatively easy

Please write about this (what is the treatment). In my case, I'm not aware of having other problems apart from not being able to watch hand-camera made (intentionally "shaky") series and films. And searching for the switches to turn off the animations in software. Moreover, I don't have problem with 3D movies if the screen refresh rate is high enough. It's also not a regular "motion sickness" as I don't have any problem whatsoever in cars or planes. But I can assure you that the sensation in the cases I've listed (on the screens) really exists.

In my case, turning off the UI animations solves the problem. Unless it can't be done.

Not sure if this is what he was referring to, but possibly BPPV. http://vestibular.org/understanding-vestibular-disorders/typ...

See the section on "Canalith repositioning" here: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/884261-treatment

If 20% of the population has the problem, you fix the phone not the population.

Or both.

Just to note: the author is not some random blogger; Herb Sutter is the C++ guy at Microsoft and on the ISO C++ standards committee. What he says definitely holds some weight.

> Herb Sutter is the C++ guy at Microsoft

Surely he must be more qualified for UI design than Apples UI designers!

We are living in an era where UI/UX designers and developers take themselves too seriously.

I'm all for beauty and design, but animations should be used with a purpose and not simply because it looks cool.

Animations should never cause delays that the user wouldn’t encounter otherwise. If an app legitimately takes 0.2 seconds to launch and animation makes it feel nicer, maybe fine. If however the OS is arbitrarily preventing me from interacting with the home screen until animation is done, someone should be fired.

Our apps have way too much gratuitous animations, the end step has 5 serial animations before you can finally push the last button. It takes 2.5 seconds to get there. I hate it but have no choice, the interaction folks want all these sliding, fading things.

I just tried out the "Reduce Motion" setting and tbh I might leave it on.

I have kept that setting for the last 3 years, but with iOS 11 it has been causing frame drops and glitchy-ness with the new iPad control center and multitasking setup.

I don't suffer from motion sickness but it was a jarring change for me.

The home screen fade-in animation reminds me of the “Hitchcock Effect”, where the camera movement and zoom go opposite each other. So every time I open my phone it feels overly dramatic.

Core Animation makes it easy, perhaps too easy

But it's not really a problem, is it?

If your wife gets ill from looking at an animation, I feel as though she needs medical help, and a specialist device that's tuned for special accessibility needs. Not workarounds.

A lot of people suffer from motion sickness, and Apple tries really hard to be suitable for special accessibility needs.

Hmm, I find it fairly tasteful and not gratuitous.

You might also not suffer from the same sensitivity to motion as the author's wife.

I think the main takeaway here is that there is a "Reduce Motion" setting which is not being respected in some cases in iOS 11.

Sure, another way to put that might be that I am more appreciative of how it works than the wife is.

I agree about the setting, I just don’t think one way of feeling about the animations is more valid than another.

For you it's just an animation, for people who are actually sick by looking at it it's a software update that just made their device unusable if it can't be turned off permanently.

Right, but another way of looking at it is that you might not suffer from the same sensitivity to motion as the author's wife.

My point is that this isn't an aesthetic choice where your opinion is as good as mine - they are reporting an actual problem that they are having with the software.

It’s hard to be appreciative of something that makes you literally sick.

You dont get these issues with windows phone.

This was written by Herb Sutter who is the C++ guy at Microsoft, and he doesn't have a Windows phone.

Bill Gates doesn't have a Windows phone.

Windows doesn't even want to make new Windows phones.

Time to stop talking about Windows phones.

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