Delightful Animations | Hacker News Reader

Delightful Animations

rolandleth.com

38 pointswallflower21 comments

> We all love animations.

False! I hate hate hate animations. The first thing I do on a new computer system is to disable all the animations in the user interface, and turn it into a more usable thing (for me). If I cannot do this after about 1h, I try to install a different software, or whatever it takes to remove the animations. If this is not possible, then I change my life so as not to have to see these animations. Whatever it takes, but animations are just not acceptable to me. There is no way I will ever use a GUI with animations, unless it is as the only road to disable them.

For what reason (if any)?

I don't know why, but they are deeply distracting to me.

I agree. They also tend to make the UI feel really slow and unresponsive if interaction is disabled while animations are playing.

I like UI animations but don't like when they're too complicated or vary too much because it's distracting. Some examples I always remember from in Material are the ripple effects when you click a button (it lasts too long and varies depending where you tap) and the loading spinner (instead of a simple shape rotating at a steady speed, the shape path varies in length and it slows down and speeds up continually).

They cause motion sickness for some people.

The vast majority of UI animations increase latency. When I tell a computer to do something I expect it to do it immediately, not after wasting my time with an animation. I disable animations whenever possible. I don't need the page to slide into position when I press pagedown, or a window to gradually expand when I maximize it. I already know what I told it to do. The animations are pure timewasting for anybody with a more than 0-second memory. All successful interactions should be silent, as with correctly designed CLI tools.

Why are there no animations in the article?

There is one at the bottom

was wondering the same thing

"Just like Apple.. ..Guide the user’s eyes to where their action had an effect.." — in Mobile Safari, when you open links in new tab, there's an animation like throwing something (I don't know what's that, too fast) to the bottom of the screen. I initially thought, "Shit, I pressed wrong button, I don't mean to _download_ it" but then I found out that it's just gesture to show that it's opening in new tab. I never get used to it though, every time it happens, for a split-second I thought I accidentally download the page.

Other animations in the article (changing color on touchDown) are far less distracting ... certainly should not cause motion sickness (to address another point in the comments).

This is pedantic, but technically that animation is for opening a link in the background ("Open in Background"). The animation for opening a link in a new tab ("Open in New Tab") is quite a bit different. Background vs New Tab is a setting in Mobile Safari's preferences. New Tab is the default, so most people have probably never seen the animation you're referring to.

I find animations generally overused, but the point in this article that really irks me is the one about animating call-to-action buttons. I know the button is there, it’s the biggest button on the page, but I want to read the content on the page before I take action, and making the button wiggle or pulse just distracts me and pisses me off. I’m not going to blindly and immediately click a call-to-action button before I know what it does!

> We all love animations.

Seems like a very strong statement. I'm pretty happy that 'rm foo' doesn't say anything, and typically I find motion a distraction.

> On one hand, they help our eyes be guided, but they also bring a nice finishing touch, a bit of extra care, a bit of emotion; we also prefer a lively UI to a static one, a UI that gives us feedback, that interacts back with us.

I know "interaction" and "interactive" are popular terms, but honestly we don't interact with our UIs any more than we interact with our homes. We manipulate the UI, but there is no "inter" as there is no agency in the interface. If you use facebook you're interacting with other people (perhaps) but otherwise you are manipulating the interface (explicitly by clicking on a link in order to view it, and implicitly by using that click to unwittingly signal some interest to the FB data collector).

I stopped at that first sentence/false premise.

> I'm pretty happy that 'rm foo' doesn't say anything, and typically I find motion a distraction.

It has happened to me on several occasions that I accidentally ran "rm -rf /some/dir/owned/by/root" without root permissions and got so much "permission denied" text it made me literally nauseated. There's something about a quickly moving wall of text on my terminal that makes me sick when there's a ton of it (4-5s of moving text tends to be when I have to look away).

Quite an annoying to have I must say :/.

The entire field of Human-Computer Interaction would like a word with you. It’s been used as a term for over 40 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human–computer_interaction

I know — in fact that’s my girlfriend’s field.

Nevertheless it’s hardly the first term abused for dramatic effect. I eagerly await the day with I can actually interact with machines.

> Seems like a very strong statement. I'm pretty happy that 'rm foo' doesn't say anything, and typically I find motion a distraction.

Terminals are usually animated. Some new line is output => everything shifts upwards.

> We all love animations.

I do, just not so much that kind of animation.

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