Bad things: - An animation that prevents the next thing for enough milliseconds that it causes input loss. Example - the iPhone calculator that wouldn't accep

Bad things: - An animation that prevents the next thing for enough milliseconds that it causes input loss. Example - the iPhone calculator that wouldn't accept the next digit until the last press was done animating. - Animation that moves active elements like buttons out of or into the way as you are clicking/tapping, causing an errant click. - A lack of animation or visible context change that causes you to not realize the screen has changed. This sometimes gets me when I click another section or chapter in some kind of two-pane interface and the other side updates at a random time. - Animations that take so long that you can't work at the speed of your hand/eye/brain coordination. - Animations that feel like you're trapped in a liminal space until they're finished, which I think is basically the subject of the article. Better things: - Coordinated animations that accentuate updates, especially when you didn't request them. Reordering a leaderboard, adding a new item in the middle of a list from a distant update, etc. - Animations that cover for slow processes. If we expect a while (but not too long) before a request and a response, an animation can be better than a spinner or nothing at all. It might help prevent the rapid clicking that some users do. I prefer if it doesn't spend a whole second when the response comes back in a tenth of a second. - Stylistic animations that don't affect how you work. The genie effect and the bouncing app animation of old Mac OS X come to mind. A key feature is that you usually can turn them off.