Once a day for a few things that you are tracking (and really want to improve) doesn't seem to fall into my "constant" definition. Hearthstone would have dozens (hundreds?) of those animations on every single game you play. Here, it's three or four times a day? For things that you really feel satisfied to accomplish?

I liked the end result a lot. The whole animation seems very appropriate in this case to me. The rant that I see in your comment (and every other comment here by the time I am writing this) seems very out of place. Everyone is complaining about things that are not what this designer did.

I'm doing online shopping once a week. At some point they added a 3 second animation of "boost" in points to some products. I see it once a week and I hate it with passion. It slows down what I'm trying to do, even if I achieve something I maybe even could care about... but I hate the interference so much I refuse to check what the "boosting" is even about.

The point is - it doesn't matter how infrequent it is. If you don't allow disabling it, it's going to piss someone off.

If a service uses any amount of animation, then i'm instantly searching for an alternative. Excessive animation like this and i'm lost customer right away.

> Here, it's three or four times a day?

Hell no. I'm not 6.

Depends on how frequently you're interacting with this widget. The annoyance of animations comes from the integral of all time you have to spend watching them; if they're in the critical path of a workflow that you do multiple times a day they get very annoying very quickly.

I've only glanced at this app, but the goal seems to be forming a habit of doing things once a day. If you're only interacting once every 24 hours, I'd take a 1second animation with some charm over a static checkbox.

Is it restricted to just one habit though?

No - but how many habits are you trying to form at one time?

Just checked my habit tracking app, and it's a dozen, 10 of which I haven't given up on yet.

Yes please. Let me turn that off. It is now becoming harder and harder to turn all those time wasting animations everywhere

Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.

On iOS, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn any of them off. You can merely "reduce motion". But it still wastes up to second in the worst case.

What about gtk3 or 4. Now there is some crap animation everywhere in gtk applications and I don't know how to turn that off.

Computers are so fast. Most software is already bad enough that it manages to slow down our beautiful hardware. Let's not make it even slower with animations.

Sure have optional animations if that helps newcomers understand better the flow of your application. But make it optional please. Pretty please?

> Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.

I recently found out about Android's animation disable feature and holy hell it made my phone feel so much more snappy and responsive to input. But as you mentioned there are too many bugs - one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated. I'm tempted to use it anyway. Hopefully in the future Android will add some sort of categorization/prioritization for animations so things can be tweaked more.

I may be in the minority here but I am kind of annoyed with how "juicing" the interface/experience seems to be kind of bleeding over into general applications from the game development scene. It does make sense for games and some apps but in general I don't need animations and tweens attached to every button on my phone.

Here's a tactic I've taken with android phones for the last 7 years and it's been a huge help.

Turn on developer options on the phone (you find the OS build info in the settings and tap it something like 8 times).

Go into the new developer menu and go to the drawing section.

Set the following 3 items to 0.5

Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, animator duration scale

The end result is that all animations provided by the OS are running at twice the speed and it feels snappy while still allowing animations to do their job at hinting information.

It's like I have a new phone. Thank you so very much for this tip.

Wow, fantastic. That's an awesome tip!

> one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated.

Pretty sure this is due to the fact that being able to disable animations is usually done as an accessibility concern - for people who are motion sensitive it could be problematic to have loading bars etc.

I agree that the categorization of animations could be helpful. Or at least being able to limit it by app.

The key thing I think is you have to keep the user in control.

I have the same rant about excessive animation in the user interface, and on reflection it is not exactly the animation that is the problem, sure, it is the exasperating factor, but the underlying problem is that you have removed the users control in favor of the animation, however, that being said, keeping the user in control requires an interruptible animation system, which requires more moving part and is harder to get right... probably for the best to just leave off the animation entirely.

My impression is that Android implements animations by reducing the animation frames but not the frame per second rate.

So if an animation is a long rotation (like a loading indicator) it turns into a high frequency strobe light (Most loading animations are replaced by a static image, but not all)

As a web developer, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... is pretty cool, but discoverability is a problem I think.

Hearthstone is such a catastrophe on this. There are multiple fun strategies that are literally rendered unviable because the animations slow you down too much and it's not possible to execute them well within the turn timer (for e.g. infinite pirates or brann in battlegrounds).

It's infuriating.

Might this be intentional to nerf some strategies? Or is this only an issue in the multiplayer mode timer?

Actually I think they can stay fun indefinitely if they are fidgetable and to be fidgetable you can make those animations rendering and acting differently according to the user input.

Back in the day, the lock screen of the iPhones hand a physics based bounciness. When you slide the lock screen from the top it would slightly bounce at the bottom and if you accelerate the lock screen it would bounce more. I fidgeted with that all the time, I was sad when they removed that.

UIs become so boring, I hope and expect to get some skeuomorphism back. Our current devices are so capable that this time the skeuomorphic designs can be much more convincing.

Totally agree, I even think that adding all this is not making the product better but actually worse.

I agree that making actions feel more rewarding is great, so adding some sound and maybe a bit of more design to the check box is great. One of the things I enjoy the most about my mechanical keyboard is the click that each keystroke makes.

But going all the way to create a 3D animation, that now takes seconds to go from unchecked to checked actually feels like making a daily process more time consuming and annoying.

(Or maybe I am just not human enough)

Starcraft did it better, everything responds 'instantly' or very quickly and persist clicking is rewarded with fun animations and pop culture voice lines. Hearthstone could take all your inputs first and queue up animations second.

Yes. I don't want to have to hold down a button just to check a box if it's something I need to do with any kind of regularity. Just give me a damn checkbox. If it's something big and rare, this cutesy stuff is fine.

I think the point of the app is that this is something big and rare. You're developing a daily habit, so you're pressing this once a day, which is pretty rare in the scheme of digital interactions.

Multiple times a day sure sounds like the opposite of the definition of "rare"

There was a game called Battle Chess 3000 or something, on Windows 95. It had aliens and robots who would kill each other in funny ways when pieces were taken. The moves sometimes took 20 seconds or more to show. Fortunately, the developers included a "skip animations" option to move things along.

Just a matter of degree, which becomes obvious when you imagine the extreme: HS without any animations would be very unfun.

So the answer is somewhere in between and the optimal UX might only be achieved by adjusting for individual players, for example depending on their speed or for how they have played the game.

Slay the Spire, a deck building rogue like has very sparse animations and a "fast mode" which I enabled almost immediately. Then again, it's not a multiplayer game and has no loot, which may have influenced the decision in Hearthstone.

Agreed, for best user experience animations are generally capped at 500ms. Dealing with something like this checkbox where you interact with it more than once would kill the novelty real quick.

They do that to keep you playing longer. I wonder if OP would describe the loot opening dance in games like hearthstone and Overwatch as rewarding game feel, rather than an intentional time sink.

Remember, for a user centric app, the goal is for the user to use it AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Not because it is frustrating to use but because it is efficient and you respect their time. Optimising for stickiness is user hostile.