6 ms·

> Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? Nothing. It's a technical demonstration. The delay is also overemphasized to m

> Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? Nothing. It's a technical demonstration. The delay is also overemphasized to make the difference more apparent. > The this is the fanciness that detracts from solving the major flaw of these sliders: you can't easily tell whether it's off or on That's because they don't represent anything. Toggles don't always represent on or off, either-- they could represent a binary choice between any number of things. > Unfortunately it is, just a fancy thing that too often makes it worse or just focuses on the wrong thing. > It looks worse vs the original instant response, why does the user need to care about intermediate movement of this binary toggle? Putting aside the functionality that animations can add, because others have addressed it, even "feel" does matter to most users. Many people would choose soft-close cabinets over regular spring loaded hinges even if noise wasn't a concern. You'd never see them in a commercial kitchen, though-- people just move too fast and that extra bit just gets in the way. It would be rather absurd for someone in a professional kitchen to assume home cooks have the same requirements and use cases for cabinets that line cooks do. Similarly, people who spend most of their days doing technical things using technical tools made by and for technical people interpret interfaces differently than most people. To developers, UIs are a little part of an application to expose the functionality to users, and the less distance between the application and the user, the better. But more often than not, that approach yields results far more useful to someone with a working mental model of how software operates under the hood. To most people,the UI is the application, and the application is an appliance. Having smooth interactions that 'feel' nice to use are much more desirable. As someone with a good amount of professional experience both as a developer and a designer, I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. The reason most end-user-facing FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla) are used almost exclusively by other developers is because non-technical users usually find the experience unpalatable at best, and unusable at worst.

anon373839 3y ago
> I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits To be fair, developers coming from math and CS backgrounds may not have had any HCI/UX/design training. For those who have, "You are not the user" [1] was drilled in as a foundational concept. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/false-consensus/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/false-consensus/
- vidarh 3y ago
  Most frontend developers also don't have much - if any - HCI/UX/design training. My experience is that a lot of people who should have had that instead see design as "above" that in a way that is worse by far by showing active disdain for user feedback. Often, in fact, by dismissing input from a user perspective from developers with a "oh, but you're not typical users". Which is on one hand usually fair, but on the other hand dismissing that they also are users, and often there is no such thing as a "typical" user. If one segment of your users reports something as a problem, you need to at least try to understand why and whether it is possible to reconcile with what your other users want, or whether in fact your other users also would agree but just haven't been vocal about it.
- sabellito 3y ago
  Your point has truth in it of course, but the main theme gp was pointing out is the hubris of people, often in our field, to think that they know better than someone specialised on a given field.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    Are you conflating “hubris” with “reasoning”? Or are you saying that appealing to authority is a good thing? Is any evaluation of any field you’re not an expert in hubris? Or is it possible to use basic logic to identify contradictions in the assertions made by experts outside your field?
injidup 3y ago
Binary toggles are everywhere in web UX. They are almost always used where a simple dropdown menu with WORDS indicating the chosen state would be better. However designers hate that because then they can't write fancy animations on creamy toggle widgets. A dropdown with the words enabled/disabled indicating the state will always be better than a toggle with some subtle animation and colour signalling the state.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Why is it better to use a dropdown? A drop down doesn't show me all of the options until I click on it; so I have to perform an action to see what my options are, rather than having them presented in front of me. They're fine if there's going to be loads of options such as country name, but if its left handed or right handed, I just want to see a toggle/radio button that lets me switch and makes it clear which state its currently in.
  - injidup 3y ago
    The problem is that you don't know if ``on`` mapped to what you think it does. https://i.imgur.com/cflIbUv.png https://i.imgur.com/cflIbUv.png for example. Light grey is disabled. Light blue is enabled. It's not accessible. It's not obvious. It's not great for colour blind people. It's probably in this case a deliberate dark pattern. The only case where a toggle is ok is if the word for the each state is to the left and right of the toggle. https://i.imgur.com/skPP5Cu.png https://i.imgur.com/skPP5Cu.png
    - aembleton 3y ago
      I agree, for on/off a checkbox would work better
      - chefandy 3y ago
        Somtimes. Checkboxes work for "yes" or "no", but they're not idiomatic for other "a" vs "b" selections.
cardanome 3y ago
> Similarly, people who spend most of their days doing technical things using technical tools made by and for technical people interpret interfaces differently than most people. Most "non-technical" people use computers, especially desktops, in a professional setting. Navigating those UIs is part of their jobs and they will spent hours upon hours doing so. Pretty animations may make a good first impressions but they get old and annoying very fast. It is a huge mistake in UI design to only optimize for smooth on-boarding of new users and not for long term productivity. > The reason most end-user-facing FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla Blender has great UI because they are dog-fooding their own software through blender studio. Meaning because they are the users and develop UI based on their own needs, contradicting your theory. Firefox UI has gotten significantly WORSE over time and the browser is becoming irrelevant based on market share. Now that is not all the fault of the UI but it is still worth noting that the height of firefox popularity was when it had a very power-user friendly UI that all that fancy "UI experts" would hate. Maybe they should replace the "foundation-funded" UI team. As for commercial software, modern UI is so bad that many "non-technical" users actively hate using computers and feel absolutely powerless when errors occur. Modern UI is actively user-hostile.
- Certhas 3y ago
  Several years ago, the number one complaint you could read on this forum on Firefox was that Chrome felt snappier. Firefox is irrelevant today because the supposedly highly sophisticated users decided based on feel. Smooth animation performance was a major point of iOS over Android for years. I see plenty of evidence of sophisticated users deciding based on the factors you dismiss.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    Smooth animations > janky animations, always, but that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether something that doesn't need to be animated should be animated. I prefer programs I perceive as "snappier" -- and to me, a part of "snappiness" is choosing not to animate things unnecessarily.
James_K 3y ago
> even "feel" does matter to most users And I think most users would prefer software that does stuff instantly. Attaching little animations to everything is just silly and distracting. It only happens because someone had nothing better to do but still had to look busy. These things almost universally degrade the interface and I've yet to see the actual benefit of them, aside from the fact that they draw attention to themselves and make people think "someone put some work into that". When you think about it, that is the opposite of good interface design. A good interface is one you do not notice – it puts as little as possible between user and machine.
- motoxpro 3y ago
  Almost no Apple interactions are without animation. It's actually hard to find something that's NOT animated on Android AND iPhone. For most users, the iPhone is one of the gold standards for "good feel". Some people like the unrealistic jumping of no animation, which is totally fine. Some people want it to "feel like a computer" not how things actually behave in the real world. It's taste. Animations that are too long or too noticeable are bad taste. But animations themselves are not bad.
  - James_K 3y ago
    Switches in the real world tend to snap almost instantly from one end to the other. That is the defining feature of switches – that they don't have a slow transition between the states. This animation stuff isn't realistic, and even if it was that isn't an argument for it.
    - Slartie 3y ago
      But when you move a switch like the ones demonstrated here in the real world, you have the haptic feedback of moving the pin physically, of it "snapping" into place. And that's how you know that your switch toggling was successful. The "digital switch" does not have that. You usually don't even "move" it, as in "move the finger over the screen", but you just touch it. And your finger obscures the UI component in the moment you touch it, without any haptic feedback (except for your finger hitting the screen somewhere, but that does not necessarily mean that the switch has toggled). The animation replaces this missing haptic feedback, by your eyes seeing the switch moving, when you remove your finger after touching the screen.
arnorhs 3y ago
>As someone with a good amount of professional experience both as a developer and a designer, I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. Same here, and couldn't agree more. Except that I'm not surprised. The thing is, developers with this pov have often been exposed to really shitty UIs where there's poor design aesthetics, matched with no understanding of the user's problems, coupled with fancy effects, that end up getting in the way and breaking in subtle ways - and ultimately don't represent what the developer is trying to do. People have a varying level of being exposed to such UIs, but professional developers, esp. dealing with enterprise portals and internal systems have been really burnt by this.
- chefandy 3y ago
  > poor design aesthetics Sorry to be nitpicky-- I largely agree with your comment-- but I always must point out that interface design is a communication medium, not an aesthetic medium. Like technical writing, it's a communication medium even if there are some secondary aesthetic considerations.
ratiolat 3y ago
When has the switch been toggled though and how can I know in each implementation? 1. Is it when I pushed the toggle, regardless of when animation finishes? 2. Is it when the animation finishes This is necessary when flipping many toggles on one page and it needs to be done many times over. In case there's no animation, it simple and clear. In case there's animation you need the know is it case 1 or 2. If it's case 2 it will additionally slow you down as you now need to wait until all animations lengths * number of switches toggled has finished.
layer8 3y ago
> the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field Given how bad UIs in general have become, some scepticism over that expertise is warranted. To be clear, UIs weren’t all great across the board 20 years ago. But there was a general agreement between UI experts and power users on how a good UI with standard desktop controls should look like and behave, whereas now it’s a mess and there are significant disagreements.
- chefandy 3y ago
  > But there was a general agreement between UI experts and power users on how a good UI with standard desktop controls should look like and behave, whereas now it’s a mess and there are significant disagreements. Details?
klabb3 3y ago
> I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field Spot on. Devs have on average extreme levels of confidence in unrepresentative opinions (space bar heating) and think UI is beneath them. > FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla) are used almost exclusively by other developers Nobody is better at pissing away hard labor like devs. There are these amazing OSS projects with 10ks of man hours invested, that won’t let designers near their cluttered prototype ui, if any. Designers are meme-famous as working for free - harnessing their power in FOSS would be akin to convincing a child to eat ice cream. Yet they’re unable to. Note this is not only UI, but general theory of mind skills. How many times have you read a README on GitHub where it’s written like the most over-cryptic nonsense, despite being quite general and straight forward projects under the hood? My working theory is UI skills and “explaining things” are fruits from the same tree. Most devs don’t practice it, so they get deep into curse of knowledge territory. Even the smart have blindspots, maybe especially them.
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
I feel like UI has changed to aim purely at the new user, at the expense of long term users. Its only focus is to be understandable as soon as possible, but cuts out everything that allowed to do things better once you understood it more in depth, as the depth isn't there. All that remains accessible are the black boxes that can be easily understood by someone new.
dz08dl 3y ago
>As someone with a good amount of professional experience both as a developer and a designer, I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. Exactly! Too many people think that their personal preference is the best. Sometimes, the best solution is to have plain HTML where the user chooses their favorite font and size, like in the early Netscape era. However, that's not always the case.
eviks 3y ago
> It's a technical demonstration So? The justification is still substantive. What would change in a real slider that turns real setting on/off? > delay is also overemphasized That's only true for those slowed down by a factor of 8. Otherwise it's not, I see the exact same issue in real-world sliders on web sites and in apps. > Toggles don't always represent on or off, either But they mostly do, add they do in this case ("turned_on"). The other use cases would have different issues like the choice of colors (green is for on) Then you overly general description forgets to prove that slower and more confusing control (which some generic non-tech users try to actually slide by holding a mouse button and moving the mouse instead of clicking) is actually preferable because it "feels" nice to them Also, these > seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. are the same people who put these garbage sliders in the OS settings menus (as well as maintaining many other common decades-old UI bugs), so color me unimpressed by their credentialed osmosis degrading user experience at scale (poor FOSS designs notwithstanding)
- chefandy 3y ago
  > So? The justification is still substantive. What would change in a real slider that turns real setting on/off? No it's not. Whether or not a design accomplishes its goals is exclusively based on what it's trying to communicate. This is trying to communicate animation curves. > That's only true for those slowed down by a factor of 8. Otherwise it's not, I see the exact same issue in real-world sliders on web sites and in apps. What you notice in apps is probably noticeable because it was done poorly. In the vast majority of instances, these things are done well so they help your eye adjust but don't stick out as animations. > But they mostly do, add they do in this case ("turned_on"). The other use cases would have different issues like the choice of colors (green is for on) Then you overly general description forgets to prove that slower and more confusing control (which some generic non-tech users try to actually slide by holding a mouse button and moving the mouse instead of clicking) is actually preferable because it "feels" nice to them You're substituting assumption for knowledge. > Also, these > seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. are the same people who put these garbage sliders in the OS settings menus (as well as maintaining many other common decades-old UI bugs), so color me unimpressed by their credentialed osmosis degrading user experience at scale (poor FOSS designs notwithstanding) Most novices can't distinguish poor practice from poor practitioners from poor general concepts.
bongodongobob 3y ago
I think parents reaction might be due the amount of shit software with pretty UIs. In the last 10 years it really feels like software has leaned towards form over function. I personally miss, simple, snappy Windows NT type UIs that were a megabyte and didn't contain a gig of custom icons or hit the GPU to like fade a window or something. I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute.
- anon373839 3y ago
  That's a fictitious trade, though. Opacity and fancy buttons are computationally very cheap, and they aren't the reason for Teams's poor performance.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    If Microsoft Teams were made in Windows Forms, it would not have the fancy look it has now, and it would be a lot faster. "The reason" is complicated.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute. It's a paradox. If you don't make it look fancy, smooth, and appealing, you lose out to those that do. Even if you have a better product, that doesn't mean you can sell it on merits of being more technically efficient. Especially to more casual consumer or to business heads to make the purchases. besides, the minute loading times aren't because it's caching all those animations and assets. That's a different division with different problems. Probably a mix of security checks, inefficient networking, and _maybe_ some choice in framework like Electron as a distant 3-5th (not that Teams uses Election).
  - Shorel 3y ago
    We don't use Teams because it is fancy, or smooth or appealing. We use Teams because the company that pays our salary tells us to use Teams. End of story. And I would definitely trade opacity and fancy buttons for a client that loads and runs fast.

anon373839 3y ago

> I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits To be fair, developers coming from math and CS backgrounds may not have had any HCI/UX/design training. For those who have, "You are not the user" [1] was drilled in as a foundational concept. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/false-consensus/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/false-consensus/

vidarh 3y ago
Most frontend developers also don't have much - if any - HCI/UX/design training. My experience is that a lot of people who should have had that instead see design as "above" that in a way that is worse by far by showing active disdain for user feedback. Often, in fact, by dismissing input from a user perspective from developers with a "oh, but you're not typical users". Which is on one hand usually fair, but on the other hand dismissing that they also are users, and often there is no such thing as a "typical" user. If one segment of your users reports something as a problem, you need to at least try to understand why and whether it is possible to reconcile with what your other users want, or whether in fact your other users also would agree but just haven't been vocal about it.
sabellito 3y ago
Your point has truth in it of course, but the main theme gp was pointing out is the hubris of people, often in our field, to think that they know better than someone specialised on a given field.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  Are you conflating “hubris” with “reasoning”? Or are you saying that appealing to authority is a good thing? Is any evaluation of any field you’re not an expert in hubris? Or is it possible to use basic logic to identify contradictions in the assertions made by experts outside your field?

injidup 3y ago

Binary toggles are everywhere in web UX. They are almost always used where a simple dropdown menu with WORDS indicating the chosen state would be better. However designers hate that because then they can't write fancy animations on creamy toggle widgets. A dropdown with the words enabled/disabled indicating the state will always be better than a toggle with some subtle animation and colour signalling the state.

aembleton 3y ago
Why is it better to use a dropdown? A drop down doesn't show me all of the options until I click on it; so I have to perform an action to see what my options are, rather than having them presented in front of me. They're fine if there's going to be loads of options such as country name, but if its left handed or right handed, I just want to see a toggle/radio button that lets me switch and makes it clear which state its currently in.
- injidup 3y ago
  The problem is that you don't know if ``on`` mapped to what you think it does. https://i.imgur.com/cflIbUv.png https://i.imgur.com/cflIbUv.png for example. Light grey is disabled. Light blue is enabled. It's not accessible. It's not obvious. It's not great for colour blind people. It's probably in this case a deliberate dark pattern. The only case where a toggle is ok is if the word for the each state is to the left and right of the toggle. https://i.imgur.com/skPP5Cu.png https://i.imgur.com/skPP5Cu.png
  - aembleton 3y ago
    I agree, for on/off a checkbox would work better
    - chefandy 3y ago
      Somtimes. Checkboxes work for "yes" or "no", but they're not idiomatic for other "a" vs "b" selections.

cardanome 3y ago

> Similarly, people who spend most of their days doing technical things using technical tools made by and for technical people interpret interfaces differently than most people. Most "non-technical" people use computers, especially desktops, in a professional setting. Navigating those UIs is part of their jobs and they will spent hours upon hours doing so. Pretty animations may make a good first impressions but they get old and annoying very fast. It is a huge mistake in UI design to only optimize for smooth on-boarding of new users and not for long term productivity. > The reason most end-user-facing FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla Blender has great UI because they are dog-fooding their own software through blender studio. Meaning because they are the users and develop UI based on their own needs, contradicting your theory. Firefox UI has gotten significantly WORSE over time and the browser is becoming irrelevant based on market share. Now that is not all the fault of the UI but it is still worth noting that the height of firefox popularity was when it had a very power-user friendly UI that all that fancy "UI experts" would hate. Maybe they should replace the "foundation-funded" UI team. As for commercial software, modern UI is so bad that many "non-technical" users actively hate using computers and feel absolutely powerless when errors occur. Modern UI is actively user-hostile.

Certhas 3y ago
Several years ago, the number one complaint you could read on this forum on Firefox was that Chrome felt snappier. Firefox is irrelevant today because the supposedly highly sophisticated users decided based on feel. Smooth animation performance was a major point of iOS over Android for years. I see plenty of evidence of sophisticated users deciding based on the factors you dismiss.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  Smooth animations > janky animations, always, but that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether something that doesn't need to be animated should be animated. I prefer programs I perceive as "snappier" -- and to me, a part of "snappiness" is choosing not to animate things unnecessarily.

James_K 3y ago

> even "feel" does matter to most users And I think most users would prefer software that does stuff instantly. Attaching little animations to everything is just silly and distracting. It only happens because someone had nothing better to do but still had to look busy. These things almost universally degrade the interface and I've yet to see the actual benefit of them, aside from the fact that they draw attention to themselves and make people think "someone put some work into that". When you think about it, that is the opposite of good interface design. A good interface is one you do not notice – it puts as little as possible between user and machine.

motoxpro 3y ago
Almost no Apple interactions are without animation. It's actually hard to find something that's NOT animated on Android AND iPhone. For most users, the iPhone is one of the gold standards for "good feel". Some people like the unrealistic jumping of no animation, which is totally fine. Some people want it to "feel like a computer" not how things actually behave in the real world. It's taste. Animations that are too long or too noticeable are bad taste. But animations themselves are not bad.
- James_K 3y ago
  Switches in the real world tend to snap almost instantly from one end to the other. That is the defining feature of switches – that they don't have a slow transition between the states. This animation stuff isn't realistic, and even if it was that isn't an argument for it.
  - Slartie 3y ago
    But when you move a switch like the ones demonstrated here in the real world, you have the haptic feedback of moving the pin physically, of it "snapping" into place. And that's how you know that your switch toggling was successful. The "digital switch" does not have that. You usually don't even "move" it, as in "move the finger over the screen", but you just touch it. And your finger obscures the UI component in the moment you touch it, without any haptic feedback (except for your finger hitting the screen somewhere, but that does not necessarily mean that the switch has toggled). The animation replaces this missing haptic feedback, by your eyes seeing the switch moving, when you remove your finger after touching the screen.

arnorhs 3y ago

>As someone with a good amount of professional experience both as a developer and a designer, I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. Same here, and couldn't agree more. Except that I'm not surprised. The thing is, developers with this pov have often been exposed to really shitty UIs where there's poor design aesthetics, matched with no understanding of the user's problems, coupled with fancy effects, that end up getting in the way and breaking in subtle ways - and ultimately don't represent what the developer is trying to do. People have a varying level of being exposed to such UIs, but professional developers, esp. dealing with enterprise portals and internal systems have been really burnt by this.

chefandy 3y ago
> poor design aesthetics Sorry to be nitpicky-- I largely agree with your comment-- but I always must point out that interface design is a communication medium, not an aesthetic medium. Like technical writing, it's a communication medium even if there are some secondary aesthetic considerations.

ratiolat 3y ago

When has the switch been toggled though and how can I know in each implementation? 1. Is it when I pushed the toggle, regardless of when animation finishes? 2. Is it when the animation finishes This is necessary when flipping many toggles on one page and it needs to be done many times over. In case there's no animation, it simple and clear. In case there's animation you need the know is it case 1 or 2. If it's case 2 it will additionally slow you down as you now need to wait until all animations lengths * number of switches toggled has finished.

layer8 3y ago

> the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field Given how bad UIs in general have become, some scepticism over that expertise is warranted. To be clear, UIs weren’t all great across the board 20 years ago. But there was a general agreement between UI experts and power users on how a good UI with standard desktop controls should look like and behave, whereas now it’s a mess and there are significant disagreements.

chefandy 3y ago
> But there was a general agreement between UI experts and power users on how a good UI with standard desktop controls should look like and behave, whereas now it’s a mess and there are significant disagreements. Details?

klabb3 3y ago

> I'm consistently surprised by how quick so many developers are to assume their personal usage habits, osmosis-gained knowledge from projects, and folk wisdom about design trumps the expertise of seasoned credentialed professionals in the field Spot on. Devs have on average extreme levels of confidence in unrepresentative opinions (space bar heating) and think UI is beneath them. > FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla) are used almost exclusively by other developers Nobody is better at pissing away hard labor like devs. There are these amazing OSS projects with 10ks of man hours invested, that won’t let designers near their cluttered prototype ui, if any. Designers are meme-famous as working for free - harnessing their power in FOSS would be akin to convincing a child to eat ice cream. Yet they’re unable to. Note this is not only UI, but general theory of mind skills. How many times have you read a README on GitHub where it’s written like the most over-cryptic nonsense, despite being quite general and straight forward projects under the hood? My working theory is UI skills and “explaining things” are fruits from the same tree. Most devs don’t practice it, so they get deep into curse of knowledge territory. Even the smart have blindspots, maybe especially them.

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

I feel like UI has changed to aim purely at the new user, at the expense of long term users. Its only focus is to be understandable as soon as possible, but cuts out everything that allowed to do things better once you understood it more in depth, as the depth isn't there. All that remains accessible are the black boxes that can be easily understood by someone new.

dz08dl 3y ago

eviks 3y ago

> It's a technical demonstration So? The justification is still substantive. What would change in a real slider that turns real setting on/off? > delay is also overemphasized That's only true for those slowed down by a factor of 8. Otherwise it's not, I see the exact same issue in real-world sliders on web sites and in apps. > Toggles don't always represent on or off, either But they mostly do, add they do in this case ("turned_on"). The other use cases would have different issues like the choice of colors (green is for on) Then you overly general description forgets to prove that slower and more confusing control (which some generic non-tech users try to actually slide by holding a mouse button and moving the mouse instead of clicking) is actually preferable because it "feels" nice to them Also, these > seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. are the same people who put these garbage sliders in the OS settings menus (as well as maintaining many other common decades-old UI bugs), so color me unimpressed by their credentialed osmosis degrading user experience at scale (poor FOSS designs notwithstanding)

chefandy 3y ago
> So? The justification is still substantive. What would change in a real slider that turns real setting on/off? No it's not. Whether or not a design accomplishes its goals is exclusively based on what it's trying to communicate. This is trying to communicate animation curves. > That's only true for those slowed down by a factor of 8. Otherwise it's not, I see the exact same issue in real-world sliders on web sites and in apps. What you notice in apps is probably noticeable because it was done poorly. In the vast majority of instances, these things are done well so they help your eye adjust but don't stick out as animations. > But they mostly do, add they do in this case ("turned_on"). The other use cases would have different issues like the choice of colors (green is for on) Then you overly general description forgets to prove that slower and more confusing control (which some generic non-tech users try to actually slide by holding a mouse button and moving the mouse instead of clicking) is actually preferable because it "feels" nice to them You're substituting assumption for knowledge. > Also, these > seasoned credentialed professionals in the field. are the same people who put these garbage sliders in the OS settings menus (as well as maintaining many other common decades-old UI bugs), so color me unimpressed by their credentialed osmosis degrading user experience at scale (poor FOSS designs notwithstanding) Most novices can't distinguish poor practice from poor practitioners from poor general concepts.

bongodongobob 3y ago

I think parents reaction might be due the amount of shit software with pretty UIs. In the last 10 years it really feels like software has leaned towards form over function. I personally miss, simple, snappy Windows NT type UIs that were a megabyte and didn't contain a gig of custom icons or hit the GPU to like fade a window or something. I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute.

anon373839 3y ago
That's a fictitious trade, though. Opacity and fancy buttons are computationally very cheap, and they aren't the reason for Teams's poor performance.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  If Microsoft Teams were made in Windows Forms, it would not have the fancy look it has now, and it would be a lot faster. "The reason" is complicated.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute. It's a paradox. If you don't make it look fancy, smooth, and appealing, you lose out to those that do. Even if you have a better product, that doesn't mean you can sell it on merits of being more technically efficient. Especially to more casual consumer or to business heads to make the purchases. besides, the minute loading times aren't because it's caching all those animations and assets. That's a different division with different problems. Probably a mix of security checks, inefficient networking, and _maybe_ some choice in framework like Electron as a distant 3-5th (not that Teams uses Election).
- Shorel 3y ago
  We don't use Teams because it is fancy, or smooth or appealing. We use Teams because the company that pays our salary tells us to use Teams. End of story. And I would definitely trade opacity and fancy buttons for a client that loads and runs fast.