How much does adding somewhat frivolous animations to an OS matter? I’m not sure, but I do know that users of Windows will be very vocal as Microsoft experiments with adding them to Windows 10.
In Windows 10 Redstone 5 (due fall 2018) I expect Microsoft to continue to refine, improve, and make more consistent UI elements in Windows 10. That includes adding more animations to simple behaviors like the Action Center, but I can already see push back.
I know that especially among the kind of people who read OSNews, “animations” in UI design tends to be a very dirty word. I very much do not belong to that group of people, since I adore proper, well-thought out use of animations in UI design, such as the fun little touches in Material Design, the pivots and slides in Windows Phone’s Metro, and yes, the brand new flourishes in Microsoft’s Fluent Design, which is currently making its way to Windows 10 users all around the world.
I’m fine with being in the minority here on this one – to each their own.
I think I generally agree with you… though perhaps with stricter limits on what I’m willing to sacrifice to get animation.
For example, I turn off smooth scrolling in browsers because an animated transition between two scroll-wheel detents is, by definition, slower than jumping to the target position as fast as the renderer will allow, and I can feel that as an irritating sense of sluggishness.
An example of an animation I do enable is KWin’s horizontal sliding transition for switching workspaces… with the animation speed turned up so high that the animation has completed by the time I release the button and all that’s really perceptible is the direction of motion. (And only because I trust KWin to complete the operation in the same amount of time, even if that means skipping the animation entirely due to lack of resources.)
This is a critical test of good UI design, which is consistently failed by many OS’: Does this ‘could do’ feature (e.g. animation) ever take precedence over any ‘must do’ or ‘should do’ feature?
What was so wrong with Windows 7 UI ? It had clear interface design, buttons and scroll bars were visible, had translucency, animation, … Why have they ditched it out in 8 only to begin bringing some elements back ?
Microsoft had a huge management problem. The Aero design of Vista+7 was collateral damage of their failed attempt at unifying phone, tablet and desktop platforms. To be fair, it also wouldn’t have worked well on a phone.
The reason they got to be considered dirty is that most animations in UI, especially those from the early days of 3d desktop effects, are neither proper nor well-thought out.
Edited 2018-04-21 08:49 UTC
This. It isn’t uncommon that adding animations make the UI slower. Sometimes because things must wait for the animation to finish, sometimes by making the user observant that something isn’t finished, sometimes by drawing attention from another task the user is trying to do.
The original Mac OS had some very good animations that not only made slow things feel faster but also helped to understand how the UI worked. That’s much harder than simply trying to look cool.
I think in such cases the animation waits for things to finish. Putting a cute animation is a way to distract the user from the fact that it takes a second from the moment they pressed a button to something actually happening. This was true for Android during the dark days of Dalvik, when an app launch could require bringing up a JIT emulator (and more often than not terminating Activities in other apps to free up RAM). In fact, this is how animations got their bad name in nerd kind, because they were used to hide a sluggish UI. And from nasty ROMs that had hardware UI drawing disabled.
Edited 2018-04-21 14:09 UTC
Displaying an animation also blocks the UI from further input by the user until said animation has finished, which makes the UI slower to use. I think that is the main reason why a lot of people hate animations, myself included.
On my Android phone, I turn all animations off in the developer settings, and I mean completely off, not even 0.5x.
I thought we had gotten past the days when interface animations were considered a positive thing. We left all that behind when we moved into the realm of one-pixel-wide lettering, huge blank white spaces with words you can barely read being buttons that when moused-over you find you can click on instead of looking like an actual button or clickable icon. Directional arrows that are actually backwards or forwards buttons, and icons that have nothing to do with what they actually do once you find they are actually something you can click on. Animations can aid in discovering what items in an interface have functionality to them, and they can be incredibly fun to play with and use. I fondly remember the days of WindowBlinds and the dozens of themes one could install with that application, as well as the other software the company came up with. But all that was throw out in favor of blank space and cold, stark emptiness in desktop interfaces.
The animations referenced in the article and the comment on the article here are all definitely visually appealing but have negative usability implications.
For example, the article shows the windows activity center or whatever pane slide in from the right. This conveys that it is a physical object. Then components within the pane fade in after the pane completes the slide animation. This is in stark contrast to a physical object that slides around. This breaks the mapping to the real-world object and causes undue cognitive load to reconcile the difference. The example here also increases the time to interaction, yet another downside.
The material design animations all share common issues with this example. They exist only for visual appeal at the cost of usability.
AFAIAC, animations are good as long as they don’t hinder usability. I think that stock Android’s lack of animations makes for a very “dry” and barebones experience, so I can’t really understand what “fun little touches” in material design you are referring to. I like how animations are used in iOS.
If I was running Lineage OS in a crappy old phone with bad GPU drivers I would think UI animations are a nuisance too. But I don’t.
Edited 2018-04-21 11:46 UTC
I’m ok with animations on the UI as long as they are fast!
MacOS animations, for example, are way too slow for me. It makes the whole systems feel slow. I wish there was a way to speed them up.
I’m in the crowd that likes a little luxury. The trend to make everything as flat & bland as possible was a huge step backwards imo. I see no problem with finding a good balance that works for most people, and allowing enough flexibility so those who prefer extremes can tailor their experience more to their liking.
“Eye candy” is not a dirty term. It can actually help discern ui elements & function, and can’t be dismissed as mere gratification. Additionally, it can make the user experience a more pleasant one – All my vehicles have leather interiors w/woodgrain trim. Do I “need” that? No, but I like it and I’m not wrong for liking it. It’s perfectly fine to have preferences – justification not required.
Is Microsoft Plus! coming back ??
Hurrah, Clippy is coming back
Animating a piece-of-shi…. I mean cool hipster flat design GUI is like putting lipstick on a pig.
I use the OS interface mostly to start programs and organize files, so I like a clean nonintrusive GUI. I mostly use XFCE, although I admit that I like font handling in Windows better. Also I like the logon screen, screensaver en music handling and so on better in Windows for systems with multiple users. But for single user setups, I definitely feel that XFCE offers more productivity and ease of use. I’ve used it for a few users in a small company who had not used Linux before, were not highly educated and only recently employed (after years of unemployment), and it was easier to learn them how to use XFCE than to learn them to use the new Windows 8/metro/10 interface.
How much of a bad taste a person needs to have to enjoy XFCE? I understand using out of necessity but choosing it?
Edited 2018-04-22 11:33 UTC
You have to keep in mind that XFCE isn’t designed for people who want eye candy. It pretty well exemplifies the phrase ‘function over form’, with function in this case being a complete desktop environment with a full compositing window manager. There are all kinds of reasons people might like it though. Beyond the standard things most people mention (lightweight, very modular, low resource usage), one of the big things a lot of people like is that it has pretty minimal dependencies (especially compared to monstrosities like KDE or GNOME).
I know that especially among the kind of people who read OSNews, “animations” in UI design tends to be a very dirty word. I very much do not belong to that group of people, since I adore proper, well-thought out use of animations in UI design, such as the fun little touches in Material Design, the pivots and slides in Windows Phone’s Metro, and yes, the brand new flourishes in Microsoft’s Fluent Design, which is currently making its way to Windows 10 users all around the world.
I’m fine with being in the minority here on this one – to each their own.
And it’s because of people like you the world wound up with useless garbage like Gnome 3 and Windows 8 and the rest that ilk.
As strange this may sound, unlike people like *YOU* Microsoft has shown the wisdom to listen to it’s users about imposing this kind of useless crap upon people who want absolutely nothing to do with this kind of nonsense in their lives.
Instead of bitching about this, why don’t you and those like you just go back to watching your favorite television show, *TELETUBBIES*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies
Edited 2018-04-22 13:19 UTC
Maybe you should consider decaf.
Actually, with that much hate, you’re probably working on an ulcer, and should avoid coffee altogether.
Animations are only a problem if they’re synchronous (blocking the UI for the duration) and they take longer than it takes the user to complete the input sequence that triggered it, or if they waste huge amounts of resources.
As a very specific example, on Android in most launchers there’s an animation for sliding the home screen left or right to access more space for app icons. This animation really isn’t an issue (provided the ROM uses hardware acceleration, otherwise it’s a waste of resources) because it happens entirely in the time between user inputs and the UI is still responsive (neat trick, but on some such launchers (including the Google Now launcher) you can actually click the app icons while they are still moving and it will work correctly).
A good example of a poorly designed one is the animation that Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 do for exposing the password field on the lock screen when you have the system configured to not require Ctrl-Alt-Delete prior to entering your password. It’s a pretty regular occurrence that people who are reasonably fast typists will lose characters off the front of their password if they use the keyboard to trigger showing the password field, because the animation takes too long and not only blocks user input, but actively drops it until it finishes.