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My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

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Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#91

Post by eru »

coldtea wrote: post #71
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer UIs need animations for the same reason they need shadows, gradients, and momentum: because these are aspects of the physical world that we already know how to interpert, so can be used "for free" to aid our understanding of the UI. Not using animations would likely be more taxing on our visual processing because nothing in the world moves discontinuously, so that would be a new thing to learn when using a c…

> Computer UIs need animations for the same reason they need shadows, gradients, and momentum: because these are aspects of the physical world that we already know how to interpert, so can be used "for free" to aid our understanding of the UI More like "for the same reason a fish needs a bicycle". > Not using animations would likely be more taxing on our visual processing And yet, Windows 2000 era UI was far more int…

Isn't shadowed and flat sort of the opposite of each other?

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#92

Post by eru »

bongodongobob wrote: post #73
slimsag wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am profusely colorblind, and it's infuriating when people only use colors to indicate something. Please for the love of god give me a checkbox over a red/green slider toggle. Shapes, please, shapes.

I'm colorblind too but I don't pretend that it's a big deal, because it's not even a daily occurrence where I'm completely stumped by color and am blocked from doing something. Yeah, charts and graphs can be annoying sometimes, but I don't expect 90% of the world to bend around me because my sight is sub par. I loathe colorblind people who act like it's a disability. It's a slight inconvenience sometimes.

Adding extra differentiators also helps people with other kinds of vision problems. The benefits of accessibility often go beyond the initial target audience.

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#94

Post by bongodongobob »

chefandy wrote: post #30
eviks wrote: post #12

> Animations are not just a fancy visual thing, they help the user understand what’s going on. Instead of teleporting the toggle indicator to its new position, let’s move it smoothly Unfortunately it is, just a fancy thing that too often makes it worse or just focuses on the wrong thing. Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? It looks worse vs the original instant response, why…

> Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? Nothing. It's a technical demonstration. The delay is also overemphasized to make the difference more apparent. > The this is the fanciness that detracts from solving the major flaw of these sliders: you can't easily tell whether it's off or on That's because they don't represent anything. Toggles don't always represent on or off, either…

I think parents reaction might be due the amount of shit software with pretty UIs. In the last 10 years it really feels like software has leaned towards form over function. I personally miss, simple, snappy Windows NT type UIs that were a megabyte and didn't contain a gig of custom icons or hit the GPU to like fade a window or something.

I think most people would trade opacity and fancy buttons for MS Teams to be able to load in under a minute.

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#95

Post by xandrius »

Animats wrote: post #24

You never get there with exponential smoothing. It takes infinite time to asymptotically approach the goal. Also, that page uses 100% of the CPU in Firefox.

Example of form over function.

If the site doesn't even load, does it matter what function you use for the toggle in the settings page?

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#97

Post by coldtea »

eru wrote: post #91
coldtea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computer UIs need animations for the same reason they need shadows, gradients, and momentum: because these are aspects of the physical world that we already know how to interpert, so can be used "for free" to aid our understanding of the UI More like "for the same reason a fish needs a bicycle". > Not using animations would likely be more taxing on our visual processing And yet, Windows 2000 era UI was far more int…

Isn't shadowed and flat sort of the opposite of each other?

Amazingly, not in 2024.

They put shadows on otherwise flat layers - for gratuitous effect, but also to get back some separation after they've flattenned everything.

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#98

Post by ustad »

eviks wrote: post #12

> Animations are not just a fancy visual thing, they help the user understand what’s going on. Instead of teleporting the toggle indicator to its new position, let’s move it smoothly Unfortunately it is, just a fancy thing that too often makes it worse or just focuses on the wrong thing. Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? It looks worse vs the original instant response, why…

Remember that time when the ios calculator was messing up with simple arithmetic due to the animations?

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#99

Post by eviks »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #43
eviks wrote: post #12

> Animations are not just a fancy visual thing, they help the user understand what’s going on. Instead of teleporting the toggle indicator to its new position, let’s move it smoothly Unfortunately it is, just a fancy thing that too often makes it worse or just focuses on the wrong thing. Like in this case, what exactly is "going on" that requires this visual delay? It looks worse vs the original instant response, why…

Computer UIs need animations for the same reason they need shadows, gradients, and momentum: because these are aspects of the physical world that we already know how to interpert, so can be used "for free" to aid our understanding of the UI. Not using animations would likely be more taxing on our visual processing because nothing in the world moves discontinuously, so that would be a new thing to learn when using a c…

This appealing fallacy is part of the reason, but way too broad in general (and is also not reflected in the flat design land of today, but even before that almost nothing was really skeumorphically close to reality), so let's try to apply it to this specific case: you usually click on a slider, not drag it. So in this case, there is nothing "physical" on the user's intuition side that corresponds to the slider sliding. But that's exactly my question - what's the point of emphasizing the sliding? And taken your physical connection into account, the UI element should become a button

And if you expect users to slide, then the slider should reflect the speed of your mouse like a physical control commongly would, not that of some random algorithm, no?

Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

#100

Post by max_k »

zbrozek wrote: post #77
max_k wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm old now, and I won't dismiss that the new stuff is aesthetically nice. It's also not that hard to use. But I just don't like the visual polish more than I like the clarity and responsiveness of the old UI elements. I just don't care if my computing experience is beautiful. I care if it's snappy, productive, and reliable.

> I just don't like the visual polish more than I like the clarity and responsiveness of the old UI elements.

Agree, that sums my opinion well.

And much software doesn't even look like they preferred eye candy over clarity; it rather looks like they forgot about clarity completely.

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