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.
facebook introduces artificial delays in the loading of their stuff because people wouldn't believe that it actually works when it is too fast
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.