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> Similarly, people who spend most of their days doing technical things using technical tools made by and for technical people interpret interfaces differently

> 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.
  - buran77 3y ago
    Some animations can be essential for user experience. One of them is demoed in the page: the page scroll animation. If you've ever looked at a wall of text or other high entropy information displayed on the screen, especially if it was on a shared screen so the image is all you can see with no hints about the scroll direction, keeping up with the motion can be nigh impossible. You have the whole image jumping up and down several lines or even a full page at a time and you spend all your brain power trying to find an "anchor" reference point to realize what that movement was, instead of focusing on the content. In such cases even the most subtle of animations that tells me how the image moved is a treasure.
    - mrob 3y ago
      The vast majority of scrolling is done for the benefit of the person initiating it. It's a good point that you might want an optional animation mode for the the benefit of spectators, but it should be disabled by default. My short term memory lasts more than one second, so I don't need to be reminded that I just scrolled down after I scroll down.
      - chefandy 3y ago
        User testing disagrees. Most people find an instantly refreshing screen of text to be quite dazzling. Developers look at screens of text all day long-- they're much more tolerant to those sorts of transitions than most people are, and basing defaults on their usage styles is one of the reason most people find FOSS interfaces completely awful.
        mrob 3y ago
        Most users only see animated scrolling at work (not genuine "smooth scrolling" tied to continuous touchscreen or touchpad input, which is unobjectionable, but playback of canned animations following completed input events). They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.
chefandy 3y ago
> 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. Yes, but they still reason about those interfaces totally differently. This isn't a quantitative difference in competence, it's a qualitative difference in approach. > 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. Animations that stick out as 'being animated' are rarely desirable. I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage. > 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. Do you have any actual evidence for the assertion that Blender's UI designers don't actually drive the usability of the software? > 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. You're substituting your opinion for fact. Mozilla's design team publishes a lot of stuff. If you think it's wrong, there's lots of specifics available for you to counter. > 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. This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument.
- cardanome 3y ago
  > I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage. I assure you, I do notice them. I am disabling them everywhere I can. I disable them in my Desktop Environment, I disable them on my Android smartphone. I am way more productive without them. Now, I don't hate animations per se. On the contrary as I dabble in game dev I find them crucial to "juice up" a game. They have their place but that is not productivity software that people are forced to use daily. They are for play not work. > This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument. Many open source devs are users of their software. You are making a false dichotomy where developer are some special creatures with totally different needs. I like what I like. There is no such thing as an "average user". People have different needs. Making software for the lowest common denominator will create UI that will be miserable for everyone to use. Now I am willing to listen to actual academic studies about UI design and productivity but your acting like some corporate internal studies are actually legit science is silly. We all know this things are are more drive by corporate politics.

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.
- buran77 3y ago
  Some animations can be essential for user experience. One of them is demoed in the page: the page scroll animation. If you've ever looked at a wall of text or other high entropy information displayed on the screen, especially if it was on a shared screen so the image is all you can see with no hints about the scroll direction, keeping up with the motion can be nigh impossible. You have the whole image jumping up and down several lines or even a full page at a time and you spend all your brain power trying to find an "anchor" reference point to realize what that movement was, instead of focusing on the content. In such cases even the most subtle of animations that tells me how the image moved is a treasure.
  - mrob 3y ago
    The vast majority of scrolling is done for the benefit of the person initiating it. It's a good point that you might want an optional animation mode for the the benefit of spectators, but it should be disabled by default. My short term memory lasts more than one second, so I don't need to be reminded that I just scrolled down after I scroll down.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      User testing disagrees. Most people find an instantly refreshing screen of text to be quite dazzling. Developers look at screens of text all day long-- they're much more tolerant to those sorts of transitions than most people are, and basing defaults on their usage styles is one of the reason most people find FOSS interfaces completely awful.
      - mrob 3y ago
        Most users only see animated scrolling at work (not genuine "smooth scrolling" tied to continuous touchscreen or touchpad input, which is unobjectionable, but playback of canned animations following completed input events). They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.

chefandy 3y ago

> 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. Yes, but they still reason about those interfaces totally differently. This isn't a quantitative difference in competence, it's a qualitative difference in approach. > 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. Animations that stick out as 'being animated' are rarely desirable. I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage. > 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. Do you have any actual evidence for the assertion that Blender's UI designers don't actually drive the usability of the software? > 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. You're substituting your opinion for fact. Mozilla's design team publishes a lot of stuff. If you think it's wrong, there's lots of specifics available for you to counter. > 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. This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument.

cardanome 3y ago
> I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage. I assure you, I do notice them. I am disabling them everywhere I can. I disable them in my Desktop Environment, I disable them on my Android smartphone. I am way more productive without them. Now, I don't hate animations per se. On the contrary as I dabble in game dev I find them crucial to "juice up" a game. They have their place but that is not productivity software that people are forced to use daily. They are for play not work. > This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument. Many open source devs are users of their software. You are making a false dichotomy where developer are some special creatures with totally different needs. I like what I like. There is no such thing as an "average user". People have different needs. Making software for the lowest common denominator will create UI that will be miserable for everyone to use. Now I am willing to listen to actual academic studies about UI design and productivity but your acting like some corporate internal studies are actually legit science is silly. We all know this things are are more drive by corporate politics.