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So long as those with disabilities are also accounted for, using gifs are a great way to demonstrate usage. I always appreciate running across them when I hit a

• selestify 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what makes gifs better than static text for you?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • adrianmonk 6y ago
    I dislike them, but I see one benefit: they increase effective screen real estate by leveraging time as an additional dimension. I guess they also allow you to passively view a sequence of stuff instead of having to actively scroll to move through the sequence. Maybe that feels easier to some people.
• adrianmonk 6y ago
  I see how they're useful, but I'm still not fond of them because: (1) Often, the speed is wrong. Either they play too fast to follow along or they play too slowly and time is wasted waiting for it to show me the part I care about (or loop back around). It's hard to get the speed just right. And AFAIK browsers don't offer controls to adjust the speed, and even if they did, it would be tedious. (2) Personally I find animations (especially rapid or looping ones) quite distracting when trying to read the rest of the page. My eye just keeps moving to the thing that's trying to grab my attention. I usually try to work around that by scrolling so that the animation is out of view. So, I'll live, but it's not a good user experience. And again, (some?) browsers seem to offer no help, like a setting to always enable animation controls (play/pause/etc.) or to loop only once.