In fighting games there are the concepts of animation priority[0] and cancelling[1], which essentially govern whether the animation for your previous move will block your next move, and whether an animation can be interupted by a new move.
Most good video game UI animates after-the-fact, so you can navigate very quickly and the UI animation lags behind your navigation a little bit. That’s mostly only possible with a controller input because with a mouse the anmiation must complete before the widgets are visible to be clicked on.
[0] https://www.giantbomb.com/animation-priority/3015-7740/
[1] https://www.giantbomb.com/animation-canceling/3015-1568/
I’d compare that with the too slow IMHO animation when an app goes full screen on macOS.
Or look at Split View, it was clearly designed for ios touch and then later shoehorned into macOS.
My pet theory is that they left out keyboard ahortcuts for Split View because moving windows about with the keyboard would be too fast and highlight how slow the animations are.
Using a touch pad or mouse is slow anyway so you notice less.
Like if the user types 'das' to delete the current sentence, and it quickly highlights the text to be deleted, and then shows it shrinking away, as the text that was following it moves in to take its place. (Obviously, you'd want the animation to happen pretty quickly).
Such animation could make it clearer what the command is doing, and this could also make it easier to tell if you'd accidentally typed a command that didn't do quite what you wanted.
And why should it necessarily make things slower? The animation could be quite fast, and I don't see why such animations would necessarily need to block or hold up future inputs or animations. (I do think, though, that you'd need to actually try it out to see if it works in practice)
In practice they are rare, certainly in consumer products. I can think of more products with janky UIs than I can ones with insanely great UIs.
Ok, I can see that something is happening. But that renders the whole UI unusable while it does. And it gets tiresome after the first time.
Ubuntu's Unity does this; it keeps track of the number of times you've minimised a window, and as you minimise windows more, it progressively speeds up the animation (maxing out after 100 times).
Source: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2204321&p=12923084...
That's an interesting idea. Or how about if the initiation of a new animated action forced already running animations to rapidly complete? Then if you're doing a bunch of things that trigger animations in rapid sequence, then they would all effectively just be running at higher speeds, in proportion to your specific speed of working.
They do provide a visual guide to new users of what just occurred. That has value for the new user.
The problem is that too many systems/programs that provide these animations forget that the animation that was useful to one as a new user the first few times, becomes an irritating time sink when it has been watched the ten thousandth time. After the ten thousandth time watching it, many users already know what is going to occur, and just want it to occur and move on. But the system/program provides no "turn off animations" profile setting. So when one gets to the point that one no longer needs the animation to inform of what occurred, one is still forced to sit through its delays. That is the big problem with animations.
Real world example. My Android 7.1 phone came with all the standard android animations turned on at the outset. At some point after having it for a short time, I discovered the animation time adjustment settings inside the hidden developer menu. After I set them all to zero (i.e., do not animate) the phone suddenly felt like it was 1000% faster.
So, in this case Google did include a "turn them off" feature (good). But they hid it inside a normally hidden menu inside the settings app (bad). Why was this hiding of this setting bad? Because most users will never find the developer options menu (because it is hidden) and therefore will never know about the "turn off animations" settings that could make their phone feel significantly faster immediately. So most will be stuck watching animations that make their phone feel slow, even when they already know the outcome and no longer need the assist provided by the animation.
I remember reading about such auto-adjusting UIs long ago, but the idea from then was things like shrinking labels to make room for more advanced features showing up. Not good for consistency, but auto-adjusting animations...
If our animations make a punter go wow when they see the product for the first (and only - unless we get to stage 2) time, and they buy it, then it has done its job.
> It’s a good idea to provide the ability to skip the transition with the press of a button.
It is not really about animation speed, but more about responsiveness, commonly animation block all inputs because it is easier.
Few days ago there was a discussion on the BEAM/Erlang ecosystem designed so that everything is as responsive as possible. I believe that is really cool.
You could add the animation, or you could remove things from the UI until it’s clearer.
Sometimes a “tool” for getting things done is actually a tool for helping you do bad things longer.
The latency they produce is.
If you had a 10ms animation that blocks UI, that would be annoying.
If you had a 10 second animation that doesn't block UI, that would probably be fine.
Even if an animation feels like it blocks UI, that is a problem.
I often have people watching me, and with animations they say "you're working fast!", while in environments with no animation (like Emacs), it's just "I have no idea what you did". I want computers to seem efficient, not unapproachably magic.
What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them?
We shouldn't need to pick one animation speed for all users, but we also shouldn't make expert users tweak it manually. And I definitely want to see full animations for new applications that I'm not familiar with yet, but not those in old applications which I've seen 1000 times.