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Comment by ambrosite | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"?

For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and understand where it came from. This does actually improve usability the first few times it happens, but over hundreds of iterations these tiny delays really slow down the overall experience of using the interface.

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Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

I've done this as well. It reminds me of when I upgraded PalmOS devices in Ye Olde Days and home would appear instantly when you tapped it.

You can also speed them up a bit. Makes the phone seem a lot snappier without breaking apps that seem to rely on animations for timing (I'm looking at you, messenger's "share" feature which doesn't have a send delay if you disable animations)

Another bonus is how much longer your battery lasts without animations. I'm pretty sure battery saver just turns off tactile response, and disables animations for the most part (in addition to changing the gps update speed if you are using location services)

!!!!!

That is a amazing!!! I had no idea developer meant "interested user".

> Make sure developer options are enabled. If they're not, go to Settings > About phone, then tap on Build number several times to enable it

> Go to Settings > Developer options, and scroll down to Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale.

> Tap on each of the animation options and turn them off.

https://lifehacker.com/disable-animations-on-android-to-impr...

On my first try I accidentally tapped "Android version" instead of "Build number" :)

on 7.x, that leads to an easter egg.

8.0 too

:( I am still on Android 6.

I thought the Google Nexus 5 phone would be getting updates often...but I guess not.

If you you're comfortable with custom ROM, LineageOS[1][2] is very stable and snappy on Nexus 5.

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/hammerhead

[2] https://download.lineageos.org/hammerhead

This is the best thing I've learned all day.

There are also various visual feedback options, such as a CPU load indicator, or a debug renderer for screen touches which allows you to see if your touchscreen is misbehaving and how (happens to me when I plug my charger, for example).

Wow! Didn't know this existed, thanks for the tip!

Wow that makes an huge difference to usability. My phone feels like it's several times as fast now. Who knew that it felt slow and laggy on purpose!

It's really good!

Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?

Only if you jailbreak

Settings -> General -> Acessibility -> Reduce Motion

Oh nice, thanks! Unfortunately it seems that apps still animate.

Yeah and I still see a lag from opening apps.

If you have root you can write a MobileSubstrate hook that calls UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO in a hooked constructor of UIView (then call super.)

Completely disabling animations would break many apps, because a lot is going on in completion blocks of animations. Setting animation durations to a very low value would work though (that’s also what you have to do for UI tests).

This is simply amazing! Thanks for sharing!

> Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

Are you talking about this: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/speed-up-your-android-by-adjusti... ?

I set mine to "0.5", and everything's much snappier, but they still play so I still get some feedback.

Try setting just "Animator duration scale" to 0.5x while leaving the others off. This will fix the camera problem, as well as makes things like closing apps in the "recent" list less janky, and you still get the rest of the benefit.

It's a real pity that there isn't a .25x setting, or even a .125 setting; the .5x setting feels nice, but still a bit slow-ish. I understand that the intent here is to simulate slow phones (try using the phone with the 10x setting — it's horrid!), but it'd be nice to simulate a fast phone instead!

Even on the 0.5x setting things like the refresh pinwheel spin a little too fast, so 0.25x might be a bit much. It just controls too many different animations.

There is a similar setting in Windows, in case anyone is interested.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

A lot. Just take a look at the desktop switching animation in OS X that's been there now for years. I bring that up anytime anyone tries to suggest Apple has decent design sense. No sane UI designer would put something like that in without the possibility of disabling it (like their other shitty animations). To be clear, any UI designer who hasn't understood the absolute fact that after a hundred or a thousand times, any animation becomes despised by a large fraction of one's user base shouldn't be working in this field. A lot of these unqualified people also apparently make a lot of videogames with un-skippable cut scenes. Same idea. Same stupidity and lack of any forethought whatsoever about the user's experience. It's almost like they're making this software with only the manufacturer's goals of looking 'shiny', 'sleek', or whatever dumb adjective of the day people who don't understand tech use to describe it. Oh, wait a second ...

You can cut down on those pointless MacOS animations if you turn on "Reduce Motion" in the accessibility settings.

Few years back when I had to use OSX I tried to use native workspaces. The switch workspaces animation was already too long for me the first time. In Windows there are (were?) at least all those registry edits that one can do to do whatever one pleases. Also Windows has the adjust all visual effects for best performance setting. But I couldn't find anything for OSX.

An example of the way I use workspaces:

- one workspace for terminal, browser with documentation and some text editor

- second workspace for a full-blown IDE, another browser window with documentation and the developed application

It's funny that there are easy solutions to the cut scene problem. If user skips the cut scene there could be a little message that if you press some key the cut scene will replay. And/or give the list of all cut scenes to the point somewhere in the menu. But most of the time cut scenes are there to bring the cinematic experience and are easy and lazy thing to do...

That's a huge frustration with current web pages for me, and for iOS. Animations that stall interaction rather then enable it do exactly the opposite funtction. And if you're ever in a situation where interactions get chained from user requests, like the bug in the iOS calculator, you're gone way off the path on your UI

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion on iOS is a really nice way to improve the subjective interface speed.

That had zero effect on the interaction-halting animations for me.

I'm not opposed to animation, I'm opposed to animation that makes the phone unresponsive and not listen to input, or delays the display of information for more than 200-300ms. Unfortunately the "Reduce Motion" only seems to be for some very minor things.

>I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"?

I disable most if not all of the animations on my android phone and windows desktops for that very reason. The animations make for great tech demos but also makes everything feel so much slower when trying to get things done.

Who knows how to completely disable all animations in macOS?

I've tried many from this list https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...

but it seems that most of commands doesn't actually make any affect

Maybe those animations could be sped up with continued use. Then new users get the visual connection between their actions and the response, while experienced users don't have to wait as long for the animation to play.

No other UI infuriates me more than the McDonalds ordering UI at their locations. Everything is all over the place and the animations make it 100x slower.

You inspired me to look up how to turn off animations in MacOS; this has some answers: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-... although I can't vouch for their accuracy.

I think animations, as most program them, slow down the UI exactly as you say.

But when their timing is tight, and the whole thing happens in under, say, half a second, you get the benefits of that context association and it still feels really cool and high-tech. People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

I don't have a link, but in referencing interactivity tests for some remote software development I did some years back, the maximum time between pressing a button and perceiving its effect to be considered "instant" is around 200ms. You don't want to go slower than that if you want it to "feel" fast & responsive.

Even better. Does that give the animation enough time to show though? At that speed I'd guess you might as well make something instant

At 60 frames per second? Sure, that's enough for 12 frames.

You're talking about Nielsen thresholds, and the limit for "instantaneous" is actually ~100ms.[0] Anything slower is considered to have taken some time.

Now, if that wasn't depressing enough - the Nielsen research is from early 90's. In the intervening 25 years, the users have certainly not become any less impatient.

0: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...

People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

They could start with 500ms and subtract 100ms from each UI activity after each time it is used until the delay is 0ms.

The user would learn the interactions on the screen first and then not be bothered by the animations later. As a bonus the user might actually thing the program "speeded up after a 'break-in' period".

Now that's an awesome idea! It'd be fine to actually just store that setting in memory, and reset with every restart: I wouldn't mind a half-second delay on my first window zoom after restart if I knew that it'd drop down to zero four zooms later.

I think a lot of this true!

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