5 ms·

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 supp

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
        > They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing. Oh good lord: what an incredibly patronizing sentiment. If design makes an interface slower for its users to use, it's a bad design. What developers-- used to looking at entirely text-based interfaces and command lines-- expect in interface feedback is much different from what others expect from it. If it's a tool for which developers are a core group of users, it should communicate using their expected set of visual signals.
        mrob 3y ago
        It's an major confounding factor in all productivity studies, and IMO underappreciated because UI researchers generally don't want to get involved in politics. Social status depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth. When the owning class takes approximately 100% of the generated wealth from improvements, the direct effects of improved productivity only hurt the worker. (They gain indirectly, because improved productivity helps society as a whole, but the marginal gain to the worker from any individual improvement is always small, so there's a tragedy of the commons here and the incentive is always to resist improvements.)

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
        > They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing. Oh good lord: what an incredibly patronizing sentiment. If design makes an interface slower for its users to use, it's a bad design. What developers-- used to looking at entirely text-based interfaces and command lines-- expect in interface feedback is much different from what others expect from it. If it's a tool for which developers are a core group of users, it should communicate using their expected set of visual signals.
        mrob 3y ago
        It's an major confounding factor in all productivity studies, and IMO underappreciated because UI researchers generally don't want to get involved in politics. Social status depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth. When the owning class takes approximately 100% of the generated wealth from improvements, the direct effects of improved productivity only hurt the worker. (They gain indirectly, because improved productivity helps society as a whole, but the marginal gain to the worker from any individual improvement is always small, so there's a tragedy of the commons here and the incentive is always to resist improvements.)