My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)

I agree. I don't have any issue with animations that I don't notice. So why bother with them? It seems like the best way to avoid me noticing something is not to put it there to begin with.

> I assure you, I do notice them. I am disabling them everywhere I can. I disable them in my Desktop Environment, I disable them on my Android smartphone. I am way more productive without them. Now, I don't hate animations per se. On the contrary as I dabble in game dev I find them crucial to "juice up" a game. They have their place but that is not productivity software that people are forced to use daily. They are for play not work.

a) Ok so you disable mouseovers on all interface elements to indicate whether or not you're going to hit a click target, indicators of where windows are moving when you drag them and click indicator animations to show that you clicked on it, the minute amount of fadeout during the click animation on a number pad so you can enter values quickly while still seeing what keys you pressed, indicators for where something minimizes to or maximizes from, progress bars, blinking cursors, notifications... sure thing. If you think most UI animations are even remotely comparable to game UI animations, we're definitely not talking about the same animations

> Now I am willing to listen to actual academic studies about UI design and productivity but your acting like some corporate internal studies are actually legit science is silly. We all know this things are are more drive by corporate politics.

I'm not talking about internal corporate usability studies. Ideally, you should probably google something before you try explaining a field to a professional that works in that field.

> Many open source devs are users of their software. You are making a false dichotomy where developer are some special creatures with totally different needs. I like what I like. There is no such thing as an "average user". People have different needs. Making software for the lowest common denominator will create UI that will be miserable for everyone to use.

Firstly, judging whether or not software is usable by looking at the handful of people that already use it and built it is like polling people to see if the dinner they cooked themselves last night should win a cooking competition. If the goal of your software is only to serve the people that wrote it, then it doesn't matter. But the vast majority of open-source software is made for other people to use, too which is why they post it publicly on the internet. I've contributed probably 10k hours of coding time to FOSS projects, all of which had the specific goal of serving people outside of the small pool of maintainers.

Secondly, you accuse me of treating developers like they're special but then say that design which doesn't focus on developers' workflows is coding to the lowest common denominator. Gotcha.

Thirdly, the entire point of the discipline of interface design is breaking the idea that there is an average user. How do we accomplish that? By not letting people make unilateral decisions about design based on their assumptions and folk wisdom, consult existing data that influences how we proceed, and test our assumptions on the people who actually use the software. If you're saying that developers unilaterally making design decisions are more open to different usage styles than a designer that is specifically looking at people's usage, I'm not really sure how to address that.

> appropriately applied animations

Appropriately applied anything is good. I am disputing whether this is an appropriate application.

> How conceited of me to not scramble to go grab citations

This what not conceited. There is nothing wrong with not having the numbers for something, you should just try to avoid claiming you do if you can't actually find any. The conceited bit was your general attitude. Writing many lines of text about how much experience you have, how everyone else is stupid and has worthless opinions, etc.

> Surely if you stumbled upon a bunch of designers making sweeping, arrogant, unsupported declarations about software development and the incompetence of developers

I would likely agree with them. Most software is quite bad, and most of it isn't designed much better. When I say a lot of designers are wasting time on this stuff, I base this on developers doing the same thing. If the people making these claims were incorrect about something, I would simply explain why that is rather than saying "I have a bunch of experience that you don't have and there are some studies that prove your silly little feelings wrong. Your opinions are worthless compared to mine." The reason I wouldn't say this is because it's conceited and it doesn't convince anyone of anything.

> "Am I out of touch with the current state of design? No: it's the designers who are wrong."

I am more concerned with what users think than I am with the current trends in design. Anyone can be a designer, that doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.

I'm not saying you CANNOT use a checkbox outside of a form. I'm saying they gradually became different UX widgets that serve different purposes.

You can use pretty much any widget to store a boolean state. A select? It works. Radio buttons? Works. Checkbox? Of course. Typing "1" or "0" in a text input limited to integers between 0 and 1 inclusive? Why not. But semantics matter, and so does the principle of least surprise. Nowadays users expect an immediate result when toggling a toggle button. Not as much when they toggle a checkbox.

Yep. It is also known as exponential smoothing in other contexts.

I wish the author had linked to the wikis for either of those things up front so people who had heard of it already (and know why you probably don't want to use it for your UI) could move on.