4 ms·

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

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?

_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?