https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/controls/pr...
putting the head in the sand like this won't make the problem go away. UX designers demand stuff that is smoother than win32 progress bars, that has spline-interpolation-like behaviour with some nice little tween at the end when going to the next page, with varying smooth color gradients all over the place.
go make this UI with pure Win32 primitives : https://youtu.be/v0GG8uh80V4?t=158
All they do is distract me, waste my time while I'm waiting to see and interact with the next thing, and move my target out from under me while I'm trying to go click it. I always turn off all the animation settings right out of the box.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day soon this fad gives way back to a renaissance of clean, simple, instant UI's and everyone will feel like their devices got a lot snappier.
No, don't think so. Instant UI's are disorienting because there's no visual cue for what is about to happen, and they don't give your brain an intuition as to how the interface behaves (e.g. a sidebar slides in from the side rather than the top). We're used to instant UI's because we've learned the patterns over time, but they're very unnatural to new/ocassional users. Some interfaces overdo the animation timing though, they can be very fast and still give users enough of a cue to understand what happened.
It’s the same issue as flat buttons, users need to know what’s clickable, and what has been clicked. They don’t need shading etc, but feedback has masssive utility. Sadly, our field generally lacks the kind of real feedback that corrects such incompetence.
Still disagree, and I think you're thinking of really obnoxious examples. I'm imagining about a ~150ms animation for the following:
1. A sidebar sliding out from the side
2. Dialogs swooping in and out from the top of the screen
3. Form panes sliding out when replaced
These quick, almost-no-time visual cues are incredibly important at giving your interface a sense of presence and physicality. Without them, your UI elements are flickering in and out of existence without any perceivable reason, and can often leave the user wondering what changed.
“Why did this get so slow?” Is a real and common complaint with such changes and why OS’s allow people do disable so many animations.
Check out these demos: https://material.io/design/motion/speed.html
Example: you can't effectively convey a menu becoming a button without an animation. Without an animation, the menu disappears and a button appears, but there's no reason to believe that they're related. A 100ms tween from one to the other is all you need. Our brains are very good at relating motion, not objects blinking in and out of existence.
Remember, those 100ms delay gaining information which also delays every action that happens after them. So, the cost is real.
Worse, people can break 200 actions per minute for well known systems. Which makes this far worse as it’s slowing people down more as they try and get more done.
Here's an article that shows gifs that demonstrate the illusion:
https://www.thisisinsider.com/spot-the-difference-braintease...
Get rid of the blank screen in-between and tell me people have trouble spotting the difference.
If you blink, you'll miss it. That's the problem: if you're not directly looking at the part that's changing (or near it), you'll miss it. Either way, our brains are not wired up to expect objects to suddenly blink into existence.
facebook introduces artificial delays in the loading of their stuff because people wouldn't believe that it actually works when it is too fast
Really? Demand? This is an installer that you will see maybe once a year, probably not even that. You will forget everything about it the moment it terminates, so why not use the default progress bar the OS provides and call it a day?
I happen to be both a demoscener and Win32 programmer, so I know exactly how to do those sorts of effects without bloat. That doesn't mean I necessarily advocate doing it, however.
It's ironic that you mention fancy progress bars, when the ones in the VS installer are even less fancy than the built-in OS ones. 2 colours, no 3D border, not even a gradient.
One of my annoyances is applications which reinvent standard OS controls and UI. The OS has (or unfortunately, more like had these days... but that's a different rant) theming and customisation capabilities for a reason. Don't try to be different just for the sake of being different, you'll stand out and not in a good way. It's an accessibility issue too: what happens when your custom-rendered UI is run on a system where the user has configured a custom colour palette (because he/she is colourblind, or just finds some colour combinations easier to use)? The OS UI widgets all have a consistent style and change all together, more than can be said of custom UIs.
(In applications like games, it often makes perfect sense to build a custom UI because it's part of the gameplay experience; but for a productivity application, a custom UI just gets in the way.)