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Comment by tetha | Hacker News Reader

I mostly find the way the opinion presented in this thread by many people exhausting.

You're doing it there too: You're throwing every bad point of every bad UI you ever encountered into a bucket and throw all of that at this article by concluding "Animations in UI are terrible and just bloat everywhere". That's very close to a strawman.

I have worked and AB-tested in UIs for games and such dealing with just that and I would much rather say: Bad UIs are bad, yes. And animations don't help bad UI not being bad. But if you have a good, understandable UI, adding animations smartly - without impeding the user and in subtle fashion - on top of that UI... that can increase the overall aesthetics of the UI a lot and make the UI much more pleasing to use.

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I agree with that; animations can be OK, but when I have a configuration setting, I usually disable them because input latency drives me crazy.

My post replied to "checkboxes vs UI toggles", and replying to that aspect was my main point. That's slightly off-topic, of course. It has to do with animations only because checkboxes wouldn't really benefit from animation, whereas toggles are an obscure visual representation for the same control, and adding animation is a feeble attempt to make it somewhat less obscure, even though it doesn't even try to address the main problem: what does toggle "left" and "right" really mean?

I believe checkbox not benefting from animation is a good thing: it's so clear and obvious that you don't need to animate it.

> what does toggle "left" and "right" really mean?

Nothing, because that's not the point of the article.

It's weird to me that this is such a big point here.

In an actual UI, you will have labels or indicators telling you what the toggle means and what the options are - "Safety door unlatched" vs "Control motors engaged". That's a toggle between two choices and having it a toggle like that would be safer than checkboxes.

Otherwise your checkbox without labels is equally bad UX because what does "on" and "off" mean for an unlabeled checkbox? I could give enough examples from work how vaguely labeled checkboxes like "remote authentication" are terrible UX.

> that's not the point of the article.

Of course not. The post you're replying to explicitly said the discussion was off-topic. That means it's not discussing the point of the article.

> In an actual UI, you will have labels or indicators telling you what the toggle means and what the options are

If it only were that way, we wouldn't complain. But it's not.

> checkbox without labels is equally bad UX

Of course, I agree. But nobody asked for that.

Your post ignores the things that were said and replies to things that were not said.

For toggling between mutually exclusive choices please use radio buttons. Checkboxes, and less obvious variants, are for enabling/disabling clearly labeled options that are not mutually exclusive.

That used to be Interaction Design 101 back in the olden days, ie. 1990s.

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