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Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convince

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

mikepurvis 7y ago
Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-10-warning-serious-failure-provokes-questions-and-anger/#322e628434f4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...
- cmcd 7y ago
  Why does MacOS only "sort of" have type-to-search?
  - wdobbels 7y ago
    AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.
    - kody 7y ago
      I just tried searching for a file with Spotlight and it found the file by name.
    - mrkstu 7y ago
      Spotlight is the OG OS integrated full text search, originating 2004/5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)
      - sdegutis 7y ago
        Spotlight has not been useful to me in over half a decade. It never finds the files I need, despite the fact that I know they're there, I know I typed them right, and I know its settings hasn't hidden or ignored them. And instead it almost always shows useless files in completely obscure parts of the OS that shouldn't even show up in Spotlight. I turned it off like a year ago and haven't regretted it since.
        mrkstu 7y ago
        Interesting- I find it very useful. It even searches my email that is locally cached. Lots of apps create hooks into it. Major part of the ecosystem that makes MacOS what it is. Not sure why it's borked for you...
        lloeki 7y ago
        Maybe your md index is borked. Look into the mdutil (maintenance) and mdfind (search) commands.
    - robenkleene 7y ago
      Spotlight on macOS most definitely searches files, much of the system is in fact built on file system metadata attributes. (It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo, who also architected BeOS's file system.)
      - that_jojo 7y ago
        > It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.
      - ajconway 7y ago
        Recently I discovered that Xcode uses Spotlight in an interesting way — when you want to convert crash logs from your apps into readable stack traces, you only need to place the relevant symbol files anywhere on the disk where Spotlight can find them. No need to import them directly into the IDE.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        Not just FS metadata, it can index ID3 tags, EXIF, and whatnot, and it’s fairly extensible, although underused. Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.
  - nawgszy 7y ago
    It seems like an inaccurate statement, I would argue OSX was the first one to do type-to-search properly... Not a huge Ubuntu user admittedly.
- vondur 7y ago
  You lost me at MacOS "sort of has it". MacOS's spotlight works the best out of all of them you listed. AFAIK, in Gnome, you can't search for text in files with the search function. I believe you could in Unity. Window's search mostly works, but I've had issues with it looking for text in files.
  - murermader 7y ago
    Yeah windows default search is kinda bad. Its only really OK for applications and settings. For everything else file related voidtools Everything is a godsent.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I'm back on Windows 10 now after a decade of MacOS. But my recollection is that it's fine as a search feature, and not that great as a launcher— if you just blindly type a prefix and press enter (as you can on Windows or Ubuntu), you end up launching a window of extended search results. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow, but whenever I used Spotlight to search for an app, I needed to type it in, wait for the search to completely resolve, and then use the mouse to select and launch the application out of the results.
  - dnadler 7y ago
    As far as the filesystem goes, navigating in Windows with the keyboard is WAY easier. I can't seem to figure out how to effectively navigate the file system on MacOS without resorting to the terminal. I routinely have trouble locating mounted file systems, can't figure out how to type in a specific path I want to go to, etc. These things are trivial on Windows, but seem not to be possible on MacOS. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'm just too used to Windows to discover this functionality, but it's a real PITA.
    - patrec 7y ago
      Try Cmd+Shift+G in finder or open dialogues.
      - 7y ago
SQueeeeeL 7y ago
Couldn't agree more, especially with apps. Airbnb, Google Maps, Snapchat etc all have these fucking awful animations for each action. Makes the whole experience clunky on my mid level Moto phone. What was the point of all this advancing compute power if everything is still slow!!!
- sixothree 7y ago
  It is 2020 and everything is slow even on current gen technology. That is the most disappointing fact about the current state of technology.
  - hbosch 7y ago
    The disappointing fact about the current state of mobile apps is that companies no longer think it's necessary to build two native apps.
    - ken 7y ago
      It shouldn’t be. We never want to build the same app multiple times. What I (as a developer) want is for OS companies to stop with all the proprietary crap and cooperate so I can write an app once. Web apps and web-as-native (and previously, cross platform GUI frameworks) are our reaction to this lack of cooperation. See also: compilers, libraries, ORMs, autotools, Docker, ... We as an industry go to extreme lengths to work around crap that’s incompatible for no good reason.
      - SQueeeeeL 7y ago
        It's incompatiable for a good reason, the reasons just don't benefit us. It makes Windows/various vendors extremely wealthy to have bizarre lock in arrangements.
outworlder 7y ago
Lots of animations do serve a clear purpose. Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere. Yes, you may argue that you and me are tech savvy and trained our brains to not care as much. But that leaves everyone else. I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most people don't even notice. Interestingly, lots of game UIs have subtle animations, I guess because they are easy to do. OSX, iOS and even Android have animations _everywhere_, but they barely register unless you are looking for them (exception for windows getting minimized, but that does serve a function). > I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95. If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC.
- _trampeltier 7y ago
  I'm not so sure, if todays animation really have a clear purpose. Remember, when the animations on the Iphone calculater was so long, you often got the wrong result, because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). Also it can be very frustrating, if you are in a hurry. And in Win 95 you still could choose all colors by yourself. Now you can say bright or dark an almost no app listen to it.
  - albedoa 7y ago
    > because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). No, it was because the animation was blocking.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC. Yeah, probably so. It just so happens that I built my first PC sometime around 1994 or 95 so Windows 95 is the first graphical OS that I can personally remember.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere I'm not convinced of this, humans come with some impressive visual diffing hardware and we rely on this to detect animations in the first place. We also know that the more animation going on the more likely we are to miss things. We also seem to be stuck in the notion of animations happening before something is shown, a slide in or a fade in or something like that. If animations are really necessary why can't the action be instant with a subtle post animation to highlight what's changed?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
eberkund 7y ago
My understanding is that animations came about as a way to make slow loading operations on web pages appear faster. Because they looked so elegant and fancy, designers started putting animations on software interfaces that should have otherwise been quick which leads to where we are today. Users also started demanding "smoothness" over speed, smoothness simply being how consistently the UI interactions behaved. On Android I remember people would complain it was laggy compared to iOS, I think part of this reason was because of animation speeds. Increasing animation speeds allows you to make your interface more consistently slow. I think animations are fine when they don't increase the time until I can do the next thing. If something takes around 1s to load and the UI shows an animation during that time, I am okay with that and I think it actually enhances the experience. But if something takes only 1ms and the designers display a 1s animation blocking me from doing the next thing until the animation has played then that is a major annoyance.
- Miraste 7y ago
  Android has system-wide animation speed settings intended for development testing. I set them all to double speed, so now my phone has nice animations and a decent response time. Results may vary with slower phones.
- lloeki 7y ago
  Animations far predate such loading tricks. They provide a sense of spatialisation and context. e.g minimising a window with an animation (such as the Genie effect, but even earlier, cruder ones) helps in understanding where it went and finding it back instead of having it just vanish. Over time the user builds a model of how it operates by observing such cues. To an advanced user it makes no sense because one already understands that, so the animation becomes an inconvenient delay. Some animations though, are just there for the heck of it, and don’t help (or even confuse) the user. They’re like the high contrast demo mode on TV, aside for being perceptually satisfying, they carry no meaning, and are actively revolting by their cognitive dissonance to users that already have a understanding of interaction models, but you’d be hard pressed to explain that to users that don’t have that understanding.
whalesalad 7y ago
They’re great when they’re done well and obnoxious when done poorly. It’s easy to do them poorly and it’s a very fine line. I think this particular example could use some fine tuning but for the most part does a pretty killer job of delivering low latency effects with consistent easing.
hbosch 7y ago
Am I the only one who hates graphics on t-shirts? If the design doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something about the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in t-shirt design since Windows 95. Ok, ok, I'm being dumb. And yeah, I tend to agree, but as a counterpoint: sometimes it's also just cool to have cool stuff. There is certainly a modernist fetish for superminimalism – HN being a locally favored example of a great social media website with no unnecessary frills – but I think your qualifier "serve a clear purpose" is not objective enough to be a good rule. What you and I think is a clear purpose are bound to be very different. I think a fade in/scaling animation for windows to appear and disappear is a better experience than just flickering them on and off – I think the clear purpose there is that it's cognitively less demanding when a window appears over the course of 200ms rather than 1ms. But hey, that's me. What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app. The truth is, animations have almost zero impact on the usability of an app or experience and only add to the perception of quality. Much like contrast stitching on the leather seat of your BMW, the reason it's there is simply because people think it's kinda nice to have and doesn't hurt anyone. Otherwise the only pants we'd be able to buy would be cargo pants... and no one likes cargo pants. It's OK for stuff to exist that is "just neat".
- chadlavi 7y ago
  try staring at some dude's graphic tee for 8 hours trying to do some work. This is not a good analogy.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  It's not almost zero impact. It's a clear negative impact to anyone who's mindful of things like latency, workflow, muscle memory, gaze patterns, information density, attention, special recall, and working memory. These design patterns are nothing but a frustrating, dazzling interruption designed to hijack your emotional faculties instead of providing you with a useful tool. They turn real concentration into mush. Nothing comes for free and if you're optimizing for "just neat" then you're paying in usability.
- cycloptic 7y ago
mavhc 7y ago
Windows 95 wasn't a good UI design, why are all the window buttons next to each other, to make it easier to hit the wrong one? Why can't I right click on a down arrow to make it scroll up? or right drag on a scrollbar to drag in 2d? Why click to raise and no drag and drop save? Why full screen windows? Why does it have menu bars?
teddyh 7y ago
Sadly, some animation is necessary for humans to perceive that a change has occurred. If a change is instantaneous, we often miss it and keep staring at the screen, waiting for a change that has already happened. Of course, this can be eliminated in many cases, including where the change is an immediate reaction to user input, since we would then expect the change, and would not miss it.
axegon_ 7y ago
No, you most certainly are not. I cannot express how happy I was when I saw that the software my bank uses is built on top of ncurses. Animations don't make your work any more productive, I'd argue it reduces your productivity in the form of a distraction. All the flashiness and the UI/UX bullcrap is what made the unholy mess that is the web today. As a Gnome user, I've disabled every single animation and effect I've seen and I could't be happier.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I think it's just important that every animation be justifiable as providing some sort of information. Like "where did this come from" or "something is happening here" or "if you click here, this will happen". Any time someone's design blog starts talking about how an animation makes people feel, it's time to run screaming.
- peatmoss 7y ago
  In the case of animations that provide visual clues, I wonder if animations could be adaptive to slowly get out of people’s way as they get more familiar.
solarkraft 7y ago
Transition animations do serve a purpose. It's a lot less jarring to have something move away than it just disappearing (for most people, I reckon).
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
> I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95. I completely agree there. There have been some small improvements — XP added recent items to the Start Menu, Vista added search to the Start Menu, 7 improved the taskbar somewhat. But overall, things are still built on what 95 established, and the only overhaul since that was actually released (Windows 8) was a clear regression and Microsoft was forced to revert much of it. Unfortunately though, while the 95-era concepts are still around, the presentation of them is an inconsistent mess now. Windows 10 is full of different UI stylings that look horrible and make the system confusing. I often suspect that people only know how to use “modern” flat UI through sheer inertia, because it's close enough to the old skeumorphic UI that what people learned back then is still useful. But how do new starters figure out what the shapes and colours mean? They don't convey meaning any more.
- fctorial 7y ago
  > completely agree there. There have been some small improvements — XP added recent items to the Start Menu, Vista added search to the Start Menu Windows 10 added ads.
PointersAreFun 7y ago
NextStep 4 actually, Objective-C and OpenStep were like manna from heaven and are still with us

mikepurvis 7y ago

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-10-warning-serious-failure-provokes-questions-and-anger/#322e628434f4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

cmcd 7y ago
Why does MacOS only "sort of" have type-to-search?
- wdobbels 7y ago
  AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.
  - kody 7y ago
    I just tried searching for a file with Spotlight and it found the file by name.
  - mrkstu 7y ago
    Spotlight is the OG OS integrated full text search, originating 2004/5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      Spotlight has not been useful to me in over half a decade. It never finds the files I need, despite the fact that I know they're there, I know I typed them right, and I know its settings hasn't hidden or ignored them. And instead it almost always shows useless files in completely obscure parts of the OS that shouldn't even show up in Spotlight. I turned it off like a year ago and haven't regretted it since.
      - mrkstu 7y ago
        Interesting- I find it very useful. It even searches my email that is locally cached. Lots of apps create hooks into it. Major part of the ecosystem that makes MacOS what it is. Not sure why it's borked for you...
      - lloeki 7y ago
        Maybe your md index is borked. Look into the mdutil (maintenance) and mdfind (search) commands.
  - robenkleene 7y ago
    Spotlight on macOS most definitely searches files, much of the system is in fact built on file system metadata attributes. (It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo, who also architected BeOS's file system.)
    - that_jojo 7y ago
      > It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.
    - ajconway 7y ago
      Recently I discovered that Xcode uses Spotlight in an interesting way — when you want to convert crash logs from your apps into readable stack traces, you only need to place the relevant symbol files anywhere on the disk where Spotlight can find them. No need to import them directly into the IDE.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      Not just FS metadata, it can index ID3 tags, EXIF, and whatnot, and it’s fairly extensible, although underused. Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.
- nawgszy 7y ago
  It seems like an inaccurate statement, I would argue OSX was the first one to do type-to-search properly... Not a huge Ubuntu user admittedly.
vondur 7y ago
You lost me at MacOS "sort of has it". MacOS's spotlight works the best out of all of them you listed. AFAIK, in Gnome, you can't search for text in files with the search function. I believe you could in Unity. Window's search mostly works, but I've had issues with it looking for text in files.
- murermader 7y ago
  Yeah windows default search is kinda bad. Its only really OK for applications and settings. For everything else file related voidtools Everything is a godsent.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I'm back on Windows 10 now after a decade of MacOS. But my recollection is that it's fine as a search feature, and not that great as a launcher— if you just blindly type a prefix and press enter (as you can on Windows or Ubuntu), you end up launching a window of extended search results. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow, but whenever I used Spotlight to search for an app, I needed to type it in, wait for the search to completely resolve, and then use the mouse to select and launch the application out of the results.
- dnadler 7y ago
  As far as the filesystem goes, navigating in Windows with the keyboard is WAY easier. I can't seem to figure out how to effectively navigate the file system on MacOS without resorting to the terminal. I routinely have trouble locating mounted file systems, can't figure out how to type in a specific path I want to go to, etc. These things are trivial on Windows, but seem not to be possible on MacOS. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'm just too used to Windows to discover this functionality, but it's a real PITA.
  - patrec 7y ago
    Try Cmd+Shift+G in finder or open dialogues.
    - 7y ago

SQueeeeeL 7y ago

Couldn't agree more, especially with apps. Airbnb, Google Maps, Snapchat etc all have these fucking awful animations for each action. Makes the whole experience clunky on my mid level Moto phone. What was the point of all this advancing compute power if everything is still slow!!!

sixothree 7y ago
It is 2020 and everything is slow even on current gen technology. That is the most disappointing fact about the current state of technology.
- hbosch 7y ago
  The disappointing fact about the current state of mobile apps is that companies no longer think it's necessary to build two native apps.
  - ken 7y ago
    It shouldn’t be. We never want to build the same app multiple times. What I (as a developer) want is for OS companies to stop with all the proprietary crap and cooperate so I can write an app once. Web apps and web-as-native (and previously, cross platform GUI frameworks) are our reaction to this lack of cooperation. See also: compilers, libraries, ORMs, autotools, Docker, ... We as an industry go to extreme lengths to work around crap that’s incompatible for no good reason.
    - SQueeeeeL 7y ago
      It's incompatiable for a good reason, the reasons just don't benefit us. It makes Windows/various vendors extremely wealthy to have bizarre lock in arrangements.

outworlder 7y ago

Lots of animations do serve a clear purpose. Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere. Yes, you may argue that you and me are tech savvy and trained our brains to not care as much. But that leaves everyone else. I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most people don't even notice. Interestingly, lots of game UIs have subtle animations, I guess because they are easy to do. OSX, iOS and even Android have animations _everywhere_, but they barely register unless you are looking for them (exception for windows getting minimized, but that does serve a function). > I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95. If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC.

_trampeltier 7y ago
I'm not so sure, if todays animation really have a clear purpose. Remember, when the animations on the Iphone calculater was so long, you often got the wrong result, because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). Also it can be very frustrating, if you are in a hurry. And in Win 95 you still could choose all colors by yourself. Now you can say bright or dark an almost no app listen to it.
- albedoa 7y ago
  > because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). No, it was because the animation was blocking.
0xffff2 7y ago
>If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC. Yeah, probably so. It just so happens that I built my first PC sometime around 1994 or 95 so Windows 95 is the first graphical OS that I can personally remember.
flukus 7y ago
> Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere I'm not convinced of this, humans come with some impressive visual diffing hardware and we rely on this to detect animations in the first place. We also know that the more animation going on the more likely we are to miss things. We also seem to be stuck in the notion of animations happening before something is shown, a slide in or a fade in or something like that. If animations are really necessary why can't the action be instant with a subtle post animation to highlight what's changed?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

eberkund 7y ago

My understanding is that animations came about as a way to make slow loading operations on web pages appear faster. Because they looked so elegant and fancy, designers started putting animations on software interfaces that should have otherwise been quick which leads to where we are today. Users also started demanding "smoothness" over speed, smoothness simply being how consistently the UI interactions behaved. On Android I remember people would complain it was laggy compared to iOS, I think part of this reason was because of animation speeds. Increasing animation speeds allows you to make your interface more consistently slow. I think animations are fine when they don't increase the time until I can do the next thing. If something takes around 1s to load and the UI shows an animation during that time, I am okay with that and I think it actually enhances the experience. But if something takes only 1ms and the designers display a 1s animation blocking me from doing the next thing until the animation has played then that is a major annoyance.

Miraste 7y ago
Android has system-wide animation speed settings intended for development testing. I set them all to double speed, so now my phone has nice animations and a decent response time. Results may vary with slower phones.
lloeki 7y ago
Animations far predate such loading tricks. They provide a sense of spatialisation and context. e.g minimising a window with an animation (such as the Genie effect, but even earlier, cruder ones) helps in understanding where it went and finding it back instead of having it just vanish. Over time the user builds a model of how it operates by observing such cues. To an advanced user it makes no sense because one already understands that, so the animation becomes an inconvenient delay. Some animations though, are just there for the heck of it, and don’t help (or even confuse) the user. They’re like the high contrast demo mode on TV, aside for being perceptually satisfying, they carry no meaning, and are actively revolting by their cognitive dissonance to users that already have a understanding of interaction models, but you’d be hard pressed to explain that to users that don’t have that understanding.

whalesalad 7y ago

They’re great when they’re done well and obnoxious when done poorly. It’s easy to do them poorly and it’s a very fine line. I think this particular example could use some fine tuning but for the most part does a pretty killer job of delivering low latency effects with consistent easing.

hbosch 7y ago

Am I the only one who hates graphics on t-shirts? If the design doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something about the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in t-shirt design since Windows 95. Ok, ok, I'm being dumb. And yeah, I tend to agree, but as a counterpoint: sometimes it's also just cool to have cool stuff. There is certainly a modernist fetish for superminimalism – HN being a locally favored example of a great social media website with no unnecessary frills – but I think your qualifier "serve a clear purpose" is not objective enough to be a good rule. What you and I think is a clear purpose are bound to be very different. I think a fade in/scaling animation for windows to appear and disappear is a better experience than just flickering them on and off – I think the clear purpose there is that it's cognitively less demanding when a window appears over the course of 200ms rather than 1ms. But hey, that's me. What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app. The truth is, animations have almost zero impact on the usability of an app or experience and only add to the perception of quality. Much like contrast stitching on the leather seat of your BMW, the reason it's there is simply because people think it's kinda nice to have and doesn't hurt anyone. Otherwise the only pants we'd be able to buy would be cargo pants... and no one likes cargo pants. It's OK for stuff to exist that is "just neat".

chadlavi 7y ago
try staring at some dude's graphic tee for 8 hours trying to do some work. This is not a good analogy.
homonculus1 7y ago
It's not almost zero impact. It's a clear negative impact to anyone who's mindful of things like latency, workflow, muscle memory, gaze patterns, information density, attention, special recall, and working memory. These design patterns are nothing but a frustrating, dazzling interruption designed to hijack your emotional faculties instead of providing you with a useful tool. They turn real concentration into mush. Nothing comes for free and if you're optimizing for "just neat" then you're paying in usability.
cycloptic 7y ago

mavhc 7y ago

Windows 95 wasn't a good UI design, why are all the window buttons next to each other, to make it easier to hit the wrong one? Why can't I right click on a down arrow to make it scroll up? or right drag on a scrollbar to drag in 2d? Why click to raise and no drag and drop save? Why full screen windows? Why does it have menu bars?

teddyh 7y ago

Sadly, some animation is necessary for humans to perceive that a change has occurred. If a change is instantaneous, we often miss it and keep staring at the screen, waiting for a change that has already happened. Of course, this can be eliminated in many cases, including where the change is an immediate reaction to user input, since we would then expect the change, and would not miss it.

axegon_ 7y ago

No, you most certainly are not. I cannot express how happy I was when I saw that the software my bank uses is built on top of ncurses. Animations don't make your work any more productive, I'd argue it reduces your productivity in the form of a distraction. All the flashiness and the UI/UX bullcrap is what made the unholy mess that is the web today. As a Gnome user, I've disabled every single animation and effect I've seen and I could't be happier.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I think it's just important that every animation be justifiable as providing some sort of information. Like "where did this come from" or "something is happening here" or "if you click here, this will happen". Any time someone's design blog starts talking about how an animation makes people feel, it's time to run screaming.

peatmoss 7y ago
In the case of animations that provide visual clues, I wonder if animations could be adaptive to slowly get out of people’s way as they get more familiar.

solarkraft 7y ago

Transition animations do serve a purpose. It's a lot less jarring to have something move away than it just disappearing (for most people, I reckon).

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

> I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95. I completely agree there. There have been some small improvements — XP added recent items to the Start Menu, Vista added search to the Start Menu, 7 improved the taskbar somewhat. But overall, things are still built on what 95 established, and the only overhaul since that was actually released (Windows 8) was a clear regression and Microsoft was forced to revert much of it. Unfortunately though, while the 95-era concepts are still around, the presentation of them is an inconsistent mess now. Windows 10 is full of different UI stylings that look horrible and make the system confusing. I often suspect that people only know how to use “modern” flat UI through sheer inertia, because it's close enough to the old skeumorphic UI that what people learned back then is still useful. But how do new starters figure out what the shapes and colours mean? They don't convey meaning any more.

fctorial 7y ago
> completely agree there. There have been some small improvements — XP added recent items to the Start Menu, Vista added search to the Start Menu Windows 10 added ads.

PointersAreFun 7y ago

NextStep 4 actually, Objective-C and OpenStep were like manna from heaven and are still with us