If this is valid, how about the countless animations everywhere in UIs today that waste time for no other reason than looking pretty the first hundred times? The application switcher on a phone I use has a switch time of 0.5s-1s with animations, practically instant without.
There's real UX benefit to it is why. Things instantly changing to entirely different layouts takes time to process visually, if things lerp to their new positions then that processing time is cut down to the length of the animation, which are usually around a quarter of a second, not half or a whole. It might get in the way of speedrunners and power users, feel free to disable them, but you're not the target audience. It's the average user who doesn't have every UI nook and cranny burned into muscle memory.
It's a nice theory but it only works if the animations are smooth and designed to improve understandability. The vast majority of UI animations are pure visual flourishes that take twice as long as they should and don't make any kind of sense spatially or physically or improve the user's understanding of what's happening at all. There's a lot of cargo cult UI design out there.
And what's worse is that most of the animations either don't start at the initial state of the UI or finish at the final state, or perform so badly that they hardly show any frames in between, so you have the worst of both worlds: abrupt jerky transitions and wasted time.
UI transitions that make spatial sense, are fast enough, are fluid, and don't slow down typical use of the UI are rare unicorns.
I unfortunately 100% agree. While an amount of whimsy should be everywhere, animation shouldn't be used as just eye candy. Like every other aspect of UI design, it has to be used with purpose and care. And yeah, that's way rarer than it should be.
Funny. I've had people hovering over my shoulder comment how my PC is so much faster than theirs when it was actually an RDP session to another PC, which seems to disable almost all window animations by default.
Not all animations are useless. Actually, any useless animation has no place in the UI.
- Some animations can be overlapped with time-taking tasks to keep user engaged but waiting at the same time. I think iOS does that when switching to an app that was swapped out to the disk. Loading takes time, so the animation compensates for some of the delay while the app's resuming. If there was no animation, the user could think that they didn't perform the action correctly, and might be inclined to repeat it, causing frustration.
- Some animations are necessary to orient the user in UI flow. For example, the minimization animation moves the window to the icon that user needs to click in order to restore the app. The animation also makes user differentiate between close and minimize operations.
- Some animations are necessary to give user proper feedback while keeping the responsiveness. One example would be the spring animation you get at the end of a list when scrolling using a touch screen. If there was no spring animation there, user would have no way to know that if that was the end of the list, or the touch screen stopped working.
Cheap phones have terrible frame rate so they have to make the animations long to appear smooth.
Imagine short animation in 200ms at 25fps only gives you 5 frames. It’s going to look janky and tacky. Make it 1000ms and it looks smooth and nice, except hopeless to use.
(Unpopular?) solution: get an iphone. Their app switcher works as fast as your finger moves, with no problem of delivering consistent 60fps.
The phone in question has smooth animations. They're just very slow as if to show how smooth and cool they are. It's also from a very well-known brand. I could double animation speed with developer settings but even with this I felt like animations were too slow.
Solution was to disable animations. However this sometimes breaks things. For a few month this broke multi-tasking (two apps on the same screen), but the vendor fixed it (though they reworked multi-tasking at the same time to prevent switching one app so it became almost useless for me at the same time)
Unfortunately I like having the ability to install what I want too much to get an iPhone but I understand how people valuing stability may prefer it.
I used to think there was something wrong with _two_ of my Plasma installs because everything felt generally sluggish. It wasn't unusably slow, just enough to notice it.
Turns out it's because the animation speed was so low (default). I doubled it and everything feels 1,000x better.
