My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

I've used this for decades. The sweet spot for ui components seems to be moving 90% of the way to the target every 80 milliseconds.

i.e ease-in

Me too, agree with you and GP. And I can't keep wondering why this opinion is so unpopular. Today's UIs are bloated with unnecessary animations (which adds latency). But worse than animations is that UIs are horribly inconsistent; took me a while to figure out those toggles should be clicked, not dragged; or: what is even clickable, how do I scroll, ...? I could go on forever, and probably so can you.

Why do only old nerds complain about this, when today's UIs are so "easy" that every toddler can use the smartphone? Are we just living in the past, getting old; are we the problem, why is our opinion unpopular?

For some reason this makes me want a toggle that:

* Moves slowly to about 75% of the way there while you hold the touch/click

* Snaps the rest of the way on release

I’m not sure what this could mean in terms of UX though. Maybe the setting is actually applied or saved at the end.

Or it could be part of an “are you sure?” dialogue. The setting is applied as you hold, but you can hit escape to undo before it snaps into place.

It didn't improve it for me. I don't want a switch animation that looks (like the designer thought) a physical switch might move. I want a widget to indicate and change some option.

It's not a great type of widget for that anyway, as others said. But either way the animation adds nothing except time the designer could have used to think about a better interface.

The snappy "instant" and simple UIs for Windows 95/2000 era were the best, IMO. It might take a bit to get used to non-animated updates it if you have never experienced it before and seem a bit janky, but it doesn't take long and at least for me feels much nicer.

Quarter of a century of "UX experts" and useless animations and transparency and complicating things has resulted in an objectively worse experience. It's slow, clunky, inconsistent, constantly changing, and doesn't even look good. The technical parts of the drawing, scaling, font rendering, color management, etc are much better of course, but not the overall experience.

UI design was of huge importance to the industry (Apple and Microsoft) when GUIs were first coming in, many people were still getting into the world of computers, and many of those who were using them were not comfortable with them. Improving the experience could be worth a fortune in new market. That's why usability, intuitiveness, and consistency were priorities and it was taken seriously as a discipline, there was research, and changes were made with (at least in part) quantitative data and study.

That field of UI design has basically died in the industry now. At least, it is much smaller and less impactful than it was. Most of it seems to have shifted to getting people to look at and interact with things that they otherwise would not have. I guess shiny new things would help with that, maybe that explains the baffling direction things have gone in.

EDIT: BTW., don't take this as criticism of the linked post. Back when I did a bit of graphics programming I loved tinkering around to make things visually pleasing and behave in interesting ways. The post is fun and interesting, and presented in a way that itself is a nice experience and must have taken a lot of work. And I don't think the author was passing it off as an end to end guideline for a user interface design. And I do accept that a lot of people do like more visually interesting and diverse interfaces. They're wrong, of course, but entitled to their opinion (/s)