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Comment by O____________O | Hacker News Reader

I think animated transitions are the skeuomorphism of 2015.

Mind you, I'm technically impressed that an E-Ink display can now be animated, but I can't wait for the end of the animated UI boom.

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I highly doubt animated transitions are going away any time soon. Not only do they look great aesthetically, but they improve the UX by giving users hints as to what's going on. They make it much harder for users to enter a state in an application without knowing how they got there or how to leave.

If animated transitions disappear, it'll be because something newer and better comes along, not because they fade out of style.

hey boy improve ux if they are thoughtful and make sense, but I take your overall point

Isn't the Pebble using E-Paper and not E-Ink? Wikipedia says the original Pebble used an 144×168 pixel Sharp Memory LCD (http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-memory-lcd.html)

Correct. E-ink screens don't have a FPS anywhere near what is displayed in the video, and there wasn't any screen refreshing. The Pebble is using a LCD with no backlight, the terminology is slightly confusing.

Yes, I misread. So now I'm not really impressed with anything about the product. ;-)

Well, thank marketing for you being impressed.

It's actually the only issue I have with Pebble. They are all amazing and unicorns, but why on Earth intentionally confuse people to think they're buying an e-ink display? It's not e-ink, it's e-paper, a fancy name for something that is not the thing that uses zero energy when not updating.

The site in the OP explicitly states that it is an e-paper display, and so does the video....

So it was with the original Pebble, and then, just like now, most people don't know the difference. "E-paper" is commonly understood as "the stuff Kindles are made of".

I actually asked them about it during the original Pebble campaign, because you couldn't really tell if the display is e-ink even though they strongly implied so. I don't recall getting any response.

"Animation" is a pretty important part of UX. The movement helps the product tell the story of what you're doing.

The user perceives lag after 300ms, and switches thought in less than a 1000ms. If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch, you risk them starting something else. And where's the fun of building a product people don't engage with for as long as possible? :D

The user perceives lag after 300ms

So write efficient, responsive software.

If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch

There are many ways to "engage the user" without wasting cycles on animation. If your software performs so slowly, why exacerbate things by burning cycles on animations?

Not all things are about speed. Helping the user to understand the "story" of what they're doing is just as important. Most UX kits involve transition animations for this reason.

Not all things are about speed.

Are you kidding me? You just wrote:

The user perceives lag after 300ms, and switches thought in less than a 1000ms. If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch, you risk them starting something else.

That was the entire premise of your prior comment. Any other points you want to hop to?

Do you... Do you just desire UI to not be animated at all? that the next item in that list just appears at the top?

Fast animations are good. I have a jailbroken iPhone and the first thing I do is turn off a lot of the animations and the phone is super-snappy compared to stock. Whenever I use someone else's iPhone, it's just so painful to switch apps and navigate around.

So I understand not wanting to watch some stupid animation over and over instead of just getting to the point. But some animations are helpful for seeing when things change.

It's just interesting seeing someone promote the precise opposite of the now ever so popular Material Design thought of basically using animations everywhere to convey motion, meaning, and hierarchy.

Everything can be overused. Microsoft pretty much invented the "flat" movement that has been happening but they're also guilty of making things so flat and undefined that you don't even know what to click on! The iPhone uses animation as filler to hide slow app loading in the first gen but it isn't necessary anymore. Even skeuomorphism is ok when it conveys meaning but most uses are garish effects that provide zero benefit.

Animations that are merely cool looking might be fun for the first dozen times but then it gets old.

Do you just desire UI to not be animated at all?

In general, yes.

Here are some examples: MS Word (2013? I honestly have no idea what version I have installed what with the new UI) does a horizontal page-turn animation when viewing documents. It literally makes me nauseous, and I don't see any way to turn it off without entering document edit mode. Android's Camera app now starts up, shows the control buttons (video, camera), then animates them off the screen. They're not shown long enough for you to press one unless you're gunning for it, and you can't pull them back on screen until the animation finishes. Lollipop in general has a bunch of animations which exist solely for the sake of animations. If I pull a menu out, I want to immediately start using it, not wait for the slick, deceleration of the animation to finish before I can begin interacting.

It all reminds me of Vista's Aero interface. MS saw OS X, wanted translucency and drop-shadows, and implemented it in a completely useless manner that degraded usability.

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