Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...
Not sure why it's borked for you...
This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.
Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.
But my recollection is that it's fine as a search feature, and not that great as a launcher— if you just blindly type a prefix and press enter (as you can on Windows or Ubuntu), you end up launching a window of extended search results. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow, but whenever I used Spotlight to search for an app, I needed to type it in, wait for the search to completely resolve, and then use the mouse to select and launch the application out of the results.
I can't seem to figure out how to effectively navigate the file system on MacOS without resorting to the terminal. I routinely have trouble locating mounted file systems, can't figure out how to type in a specific path I want to go to, etc. These things are trivial on Windows, but seem not to be possible on MacOS. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'm just too used to Windows to discover this functionality, but it's a real PITA.
Wish this was a bit more discoverable on MacOS - I think that's what windows' file explorer is particularly good at. Though, I'm almost certainly biased.
I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most people don't even notice. Interestingly, lots of game UIs have subtle animations, I guess because they are easy to do. OSX, iOS and even Android have animations _everywhere_, but they barely register unless you are looking for them (exception for windows getting minimized, but that does serve a function).
> I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.
If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC.
And in Win 95 you still could choose all colors by yourself. Now you can say bright or dark an almost no app listen to it.
No, it was because the animation was blocking.
Yeah, probably so. It just so happens that I built my first PC sometime around 1994 or 95 so Windows 95 is the first graphical OS that I can personally remember.
I'm not convinced of this, humans come with some impressive visual diffing hardware and we rely on this to detect animations in the first place. We also know that the more animation going on the more likely we are to miss things.
We also seem to be stuck in the notion of animations happening before something is shown, a slide in or a fade in or something like that. If animations are really necessary why can't the action be instant with a subtle post animation to highlight what's changed?
Users also started demanding "smoothness" over speed, smoothness simply being how consistently the UI interactions behaved. On Android I remember people would complain it was laggy compared to iOS, I think part of this reason was because of animation speeds. Increasing animation speeds allows you to make your interface more consistently slow.
I think animations are fine when they don't increase the time until I can do the next thing. If something takes around 1s to load and the UI shows an animation during that time, I am okay with that and I think it actually enhances the experience. But if something takes only 1ms and the designers display a 1s animation blocking me from doing the next thing until the animation has played then that is a major annoyance.
They provide a sense of spatialisation and context. e.g minimising a window with an animation (such as the Genie effect, but even earlier, cruder ones) helps in understanding where it went and finding it back instead of having it just vanish. Over time the user builds a model of how it operates by observing such cues. To an advanced user it makes no sense because one already understands that, so the animation becomes an inconvenient delay.
Some animations though, are just there for the heck of it, and don’t help (or even confuse) the user. They’re like the high contrast demo mode on TV, aside for being perceptually satisfying, they carry no meaning, and are actively revolting by their cognitive dissonance to users that already have a understanding of interaction models, but you’d be hard pressed to explain that to users that don’t have that understanding.
I completely agree there. There have been some small improvements — XP added recent items to the Start Menu, Vista added search to the Start Menu, 7 improved the taskbar somewhat. But overall, things are still built on what 95 established, and the only overhaul since that was actually released (Windows 8) was a clear regression and Microsoft was forced to revert much of it.
Unfortunately though, while the 95-era concepts are still around, the presentation of them is an inconsistent mess now. Windows 10 is full of different UI stylings that look horrible and make the system confusing. I often suspect that people only know how to use “modern” flat UI through sheer inertia, because it's close enough to the old skeumorphic UI that what people learned back then is still useful. But how do new starters figure out what the shapes and colours mean? They don't convey meaning any more.
Windows 10 added ads.
Any time someone's design blog starts talking about how an animation makes people feel, it's time to run screaming.
See also: compilers, libraries, ORMs, autotools, Docker, ... We as an industry go to extreme lengths to work around crap that’s incompatible for no good reason.
Ok, ok, I'm being dumb. And yeah, I tend to agree, but as a counterpoint: sometimes it's also just cool to have cool stuff. There is certainly a modernist fetish for superminimalism – HN being a locally favored example of a great social media website with no unnecessary frills – but I think your qualifier "serve a clear purpose" is not objective enough to be a good rule. What you and I think is a clear purpose are bound to be very different. I think a fade in/scaling animation for windows to appear and disappear is a better experience than just flickering them on and off – I think the clear purpose there is that it's cognitively less demanding when a window appears over the course of 200ms rather than 1ms. But hey, that's me.
What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app. The truth is, animations have almost zero impact on the usability of an app or experience and only add to the perception of quality. Much like contrast stitching on the leather seat of your BMW, the reason it's there is simply because people think it's kinda nice to have and doesn't hurt anyone. Otherwise the only pants we'd be able to buy would be cargo pants... and no one likes cargo pants.
It's OK for stuff to exist that is "just neat".
Nothing comes for free and if you're optimizing for "just neat" then you're paying in usability.
I don't know if this helps or hurts your point, but I do in fact also hate graphical T's. All of my T-shirts are solid colors and most of them are black.
>What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app.
Thankfully I don't have to use macOS very often, but I don't think any of those serve a purpose and they constantly (but mildly) annoy me when I do have to boot up my mac. The minimization effect is important, but it should still be fast.
I think this particular example could use some fine tuning but for the most part does a pretty killer job of delivering low latency effects with consistent easing.
Of course, this can be eliminated in many cases, including where the change is an immediate reaction to user input, since we would then expect the change, and would not miss it.