Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

The article's mention of beautifully designed mobile apps sparked a few thoughts for me. One property of mobile devices and especially smaller devices like phones is people use them frequently throughout the day in short bursts. Small wait times associated with bouncing, translating animations etc are magnified and the UIs start to feel laggy. Yesterday I purchased my first Android device and the snappy UI has been quite a nice change. This is a relatively low-end Android device. And I've been using an iPhone 4S for the past few months.

So I think the design of mobile apps will be simplified going forward. I could see moving towards simpler UIs like Craigslist. This is a major win in a variety of ways: faster UIs implies better user-experience, less computationally intensive UIs implies less drain on limited resources, and simpler UIs implies less design and development time. I love the idea of never stressing out about rounded corners, little shadow and shine marks etc. They're nice to have initially but just get old as one uses the same device/OS/apps for months on end.

I disagree about the prediction for simplified Craigslist-style UIs. I don't think it will ever happen on Mobile.

Animations play a very important role in communicating to the user how to interact with the interface. Animations also give the illusion of a responsive app.

The best apps are likely built by great designers who know how to use animations effectively to communicate with the user.

Everyone else will simply try to copy the best apps along with their animations... thus, it's hard to see animations going away any time soon.

On another note, I find it surprising that yours was the only comment even mentioning design. For me, that was the most important part of the article with by far the biggest implications.

The author predicts that designers will be able to take on a portion of the client-side engineering role in the near future. If this happens, it will completely change how apps are made. It will change the workflow between designers and engineers.

The traditional model of mocking up a PSD and passing it off to an engineer will no longer be viable. Designers will just build clients and interact with APIs. This means that more and more designers will probably have to learn programming, which is a good thing for the future of mobile apps.

I think you're right about animation not going away. Especially animations that help the user understand the app. However I think there's still some animations and especially some shadow, gradients and other small design touches that are overkill and can be removed w/o negatively impacting the user-experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com