One problem with the argument...animations are often added for a very good reason. I suspect in the Slack example, it's to cover for the fact that there's a bu

One problem with the argument...animations are often added for a very good reason. I suspect in the Slack example, it's to cover for the fact that there's a bunch of network calls being made behind the scenes. A terminal version of Slack wouldn't be that much faster since it would still need to make those network calls. Also, adding animations can improve the trust that a user has in the product. The CoinStar example is a great one...when they just immediately displayed the count of coins to users, they didn't trust the count because it was too quick. When they added a delay and played the sound of lots of coins bouncing around inside a machine for a while, people start to trust the count. And that's not unique. I've worked on at least 3 projects now where we've done something we felt differentiated our product but, in testing, our users notice. But after adding a delay and animation, we retested it and our users were much more impressed and happy with our product. By making it slow, it was much more apparent that the system was doing something impressive. Never mind the fact that we'd optimized the hell out of queries and made the execution time snappy, it needed to be slow for them to see the value. Also, animations can be useful to draw the eye to a change that's happening in the system. When something changes in a UI, you can't just expect the user to notice it. The human visual system isn't good at noticing those small deltas without some visual cue to make the change pop. None of this means that all usages of animations improve the user experience. But nowhere in the article does the author acknowledge that animations can serve an important purpose. We need to take a balanced approach to animations and make sure we test each and every animation we use with users to ensure that it's better than the non-animated alternative. One other small point, as someone who has developed software for people over the age of 70, I believe the author will be singing a very different tune with regard to "overly-large fonts sizes" once his eyesight starts to deteriorate. I'd actually say that the tendency is actually worse in the other direction...developers make font sizes too small, since they're young and have good eyesight. Apps should be optimized for large font sizes with a setting to allow users that want smaller fonts to choose that. But the number of times I've seen my mother be unable to find the setting to increase the font because the default font is too small is a non-trivial number. And even when I increase it for her, it's a good bet that the app is unusable since that configuration hasn't been tested.