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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>However, this still looks a bit clumsy due to having a constant speed

Does it? Looks much better to me, and preferred to waiting for a animation to be given more time to speedup while looking "smooth" (they seldom seem to be given the same time as instant or linear animations, do they? For some reason we have to be forced to enjoy them in half time).

In fact I'd take the "instant toggle" in a heartbeat too. Real life toggles don't "exponentially smooth" from one side to the other either.

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I hate animations like that because they are intentionally slowing down the UI. I already clicked it, why are you spending several milliseconds to update your state?

Animations, or anything else really, should only be used to improve things. Ask what the problem is, not what cool solution I should implement. It's ok to go to town if the page is artistic, like your blog, but if I'm filling out a form? Get your art out of here.

Beauty is often worth a little extra time. I'd rather walk a beautiful trail than a paved sidewalk beside 6 lanes of fast traffic.

It's cool to choose the tools that appeal to your values. It's not cool to advocate for paving the planet in your quest for single-minded efficiency.

> I'd rather walk a beautiful trail than a paved sidewalk beside 6 lanes of fast traffic.

But would you still prefer it if alternative paved sidewalk is 5 times shorter AND you need to walk between same two points of interest multiple times per day, everyday?

>Beauty is often worth a little extra time. I'd rather walk a beautiful trail than a paved sidewalk beside 6 lanes of fast traffic

Beauty can be expressed with the toggle's design, with the window decoration, with the colors, with the wallpaper, choice of font, and so on.

No need to be expressed with an animation.

If your car did a little "song and dance" everytime you started it up that you had to wait to be able to drive it off, it would get annoying really fast.

Nobody's waiting on a checkbox to finish filling on before moving onto the next.

In this case, not necessarily. It's obviously designed to animate in a particular way. Why? Is it just for kicks, or is there a reason for it to animate as it's moving? Is it going to bounce back half-way through because the system realized you're not allowed to turn that thing on for example? I don't know, so I would wait for it to finish.

I admire the dedication to do this, but I find it superfluous when designing something I need to actually use. Great for a game, not so great for a page of checkbox thingies I need to set to the right values to make something else work correctly. I don't really want it to animate well, I want it to work fast and to be obvious what it does and how it works. It doesn't have to be pretty, unless being pretty helps make it more clear what's what.

Just because the switch takes time to move doesn't mean the new state doesn't take effect. I would expect the state to change immediately then the animation runs.

The only problem with instant transitions is that sometimes you may not notice what changed. I would like to see a UI built around instant transitions but with subtle animations that happen after to emphasize the change. Like the new content shines, or does a tiny bit of grow/shrink, but not in a way that prevents interaction. There's nothing I hate more than waiting for long transition animations (looking at you, macOS fullscreen button)

We've solved this problem already without animations.

You just highlight the data that has changed and have an "Apply" button to save those changes.

Toggle buttons are supposed to have an instant effect. It's an anti pattern to gate the effect on a submit.

According to who? It's a restyled checkbox.

Well, stuff like this used to be encoded in HIGs (Human Interface Guidelines). The GNOME HIG, back in the day, had the parent's recommendation, as well as the rationale for it: so that the feedback is immediate, and the user can then visually see the effect that that option has.

Gating it on a submit forces a user who is looking for something & not finding it into a "try one thing, submit, evaluate, open settings, undo that, try different thing, submit…" loop, which is a lot longer.

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