3 ms·

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, de

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.

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.