Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

ProfessorLayton

I highly disagree that the animations are superfluous for the vast majority of users. Yes, they can be superfluous, but that's not by their nature of existing.

History shows us that consumers value good UX, of which animation is a key component. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the fist one to take UX as seriously as the hardware.

As for the examples:

- Slack: Yes, it takes forever to load and I hate that, the real problem is performance, not the animation. Would it be better if no animation happened and didn't inform the user about about what's going on? Keep in mind that the animation also serves to inform the user that it hasn't "frozen", so a still interstitial would be a regression.

- Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

I do value choice though, so perhaps there should be a setting for power users to disable/minimize them.

> Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if there's a level of nuance to be found here. For example, animations are acceptable iff they do not extend the time required to perceive the requested action.

In other words, it's already going to take me some fraction of a second to perceive any change; animations within that fraction of a second are perfectly fine. Anything that extends the change past that fraction of a second, however, is eating into my productivity (or at least, so the author would claim).

When i upgraded my phone gro a nexus 5 to an S7 i was initially confused that my new (3 years newer, higher end) phone seemed sluggish compared to my old one.

It turned out that I'd enabled an option to double animation on the old phone. Enabling the same option on the new phone made everything as fast as expected.

That said, I really appteciate the (faster) animations. I wouldn't want to do a without them at all.

The user could be told what's going on without breaking the entire flow through. That's what status bars did. Even if they're not the answer now, there's endless ways to notify a user of action. The old rotating "e" of Internet Explorer. A progress bar embedded next to the relevant part that's loading. A tick mark that shows up then fades away when an item is done. Etc etc

> - Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

The video the author links from Minority Report of an "incredible and desirable" UI, has animations seemingly for this exact reason. One is basically the same as Spaces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJqbivkm0Ms

I think UIs that give intuitive feedback are the best UIs, even if they are a tiny bit "slower". I'm happy to memorize a bunch of VIM commands because I write code everyday and it makes me much more productive, but I don't want to have to do this for every application. Especially once we start physically interacting with them.

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