Some of example animations are buggy -
My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
101–110 of 390 posts
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#102Earlier 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.
300 million people with some form of color blindness, and for a minority of those it's much worse than others. It's great your vision doesn't affect you most days, I hope you live a happy life.
For me, it's pretty annoying having to screenshot applications every few days, to be able to drag it into a color picker to be able to see what is actually on the screen.
It's pretty annoying being in a Zoom call, in a tense customer call trying to debug something, and then having to screenshot a Grafana dashboard and drag it into a photo editor on the fly to understand what a customer is telling me - or have to divert the already tense conversation to 'sorry can you tell me what I'm looking at, my vision is fucked?'
It's pretty annoying always being that inconvenience-to-others person asking for a link to the google slides, because I can't tell what is being shown on that pie chart.
And I get it, I'm in a minority of minorities here. And it's not like 'wow colorblindness has ruined my life now I can't cook or clean myself!' - so I understand where you are coming from with 'it's not a real disability'
But like, I'm not asking for you to go and construct a concrete pathway up a mountain here.
I'm just asking that maybe when you are quickly adding 'a slider that indicates on/off using nothing other than color' to your shitty web app, that maybe you could just go with a checkbox instead? Or keep the slider and all the colors, but just add `on` and `off` labels to it too? Or add a hover text that says it's 'enabled'? Or at least steal Apple's slider colors instead of coming up with your own low-contrast ones?
And yeah, I get it - we live in a world of 'omg wow I got glasses for christmas and now I can finally see color through my tears again!!!' social media garbage content. I just want to be able to know what a button is going to do when I click it.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then a toogle button is a bad example. It's a replacement for checkbox and adds ambivalence that the checkbox doesn't have. Can you tell me which position of the toggle means on? Purple or green.
the color choice is the problem, not the toggle. If you had red or green, which one is on?
Not color choice, but existence of color.
Some people have trouble distinguishing between red and green.
Black and white is easy - checkbox is understandable quicker than a toggle.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss old school checkboxes for UI toggles. They're crisp and clear and don't entice bored people to animate them.
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 mostly find the way the opinion presented in this thread by many people exhausting.
You're doing it there too: You're throwing every bad point of every bad UI you ever encountered into a bucket and throw all of that at this article by concluding "Animations in UI are terrible and just bloat everywhere". That's very close to a strawman.
I have worked and AB-tested in UIs for games and such dealing with just that and I would much rather say: Bad UIs are bad, yes. And animations don't help bad UI not being bad. But if you have a good, understandable UI, adding animations smartly - without impeding the user and in subtle fashion - on top of that UI... that can increase the overall aesthetics of the UI a lot and make the UI much more pleasing to use.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#105[dead]
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#106Earlier 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.
But, making UIs tuned for colorblind people make it easier also for others - colors should be distinguishable easily.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss old school checkboxes for UI toggles. They're crisp and clear and don't entice bored people to animate them.
I’m quietly obsessed with the idea of rebuilding a lot of modern user interfaces just using classic controls that we’ve had since the 90s. Checkboxes, radio buttons, labels and text input elements. I don’t know if it would be as good as what we have now, but there would be something so relaxing about all of my applications looking like they’re part of the same world.
Back in the days, you had a UI toolkit, and everybody would use those native controls; they looked and felt the same in all application, and you had a central place where you could customize the look. Now every application/website has customized controls for everything; everything looks and works differently.
(And don't even get me started with websites implementing their own scrollbars with JavaScript. Uh!)
Custom list control: do Home/End buttons work? How to select multiple items, does Shift-Cursorkeys work? Does Ctrl-Click work? Of course not.
Custom text control: does Ctrl-Left/Right for word jumping work? Does Ctrl-Up/Down for paragraph jumping work? Can I select everything with Ctrl-A or does it select the whole website? Can I select everything from cursor until the end with Ctrl-Shift-End work? Does Copy/Paste work at all? (I have never figured out why Copy/Paste in Teams simply doesn't work. Apparently I'm the only one with this problem.)
Custom dropdown control: does Alt-Down work? Can I scroll the list with the usual keys?
If (web) developers would just use standard controls, everything would work the same, and they wouldn't have to reimplement all the basic things from scratch (or not at all). Web devs could write forms that work without megabytes of JavaScript.
Hamburger menus. Those horrible things didn't need to exist even in old times with small monitors and 640x480 (or less) - but now they exist everywhere on my 32" 4K monitor for no reason.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#108Earlier 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…
Got any research to back up that claim? I always go to the developer settings and turn off all animations on my Android phones, and it makes a monumental difference in usability, exclusively for the better. I did it on my moms phone as well, and she instantly felt it got faster, so this is not just because I am a technical person. Some UI designers think animations are good, but they are not. They are a clutch that d…
Wow just did what you suggested and indeed it feels much faster. I was sceptical at first but this is actually better.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#109I like this although I'm going to stick my neck out and say the author is objectively wrong that sqrt is better than cubic for a toggle switch, and that cubic is in fact the better choice for this situation simply because of the way real life toggle switches generally work.
Think about the breaker switches on the electrical consumer unit on your house, or the kind of switches you often find on analog synths or other audio gear, generally stuff that's going for a particular aesthetic. I have a small Hughes & Kettner guitar amp that has two of these switches that are very satisfying to use[0].
When you use these kinds of switches in real life there's some initial resistance, and then they suddenly snap into the new position because of the way they're spring loaded. This is more closely modelled by the cubic function than it is by either the sqrt or the exponential smoothing function.
Other than that absolute nitpick, I really enjoyed the piece. It well illustrates how animation can enhance a user experience when done well (with, for example, an appropriate easing function) or alternatively detract from it and be quite jarring if not implemented thoughtfully (thinking particularly of the linear interpolation examples).
[0] This does somewhat depend on the type of toggle switch, although even the variety that you find on something like a Minimoog (this isn't some sort of gear flex, by the way - I don't own one of these!) exhibit this "resist then snap to the new position" behaviour that makes them so enjoyable to flick.
Re: My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
#110Earlier 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 mostly find the way the opinion presented in this thread by many people exhausting. You're doing it there too: You're throwing every bad point of every bad UI you ever encountered into a bucket and throw all of that at this article by concluding "Animations in UI are terrible and just bloat everywhere". That's very close to a strawman. I have worked and AB-tested in UIs for games and such dealing with just that and…
I agree with that; animations can be OK, but when I have a configuration setting, I usually disable them because input latency drives me crazy.
My post replied to "checkboxes vs UI toggles", and replying to that aspect was my main point. That's slightly off-topic, of course. It has to do with animations only because checkboxes wouldn't really benefit from animation, whereas toggles are an obscure visual representation for the same control, and adding animation is a feeble attempt to make it somewhat less obscure, even though it doesn't even try to address the main problem: what does toggle "left" and "right" really mean?
I believe checkbox not benefting from animation is a good thing: it's so clear and obvious that you don't need to animate it.