Every Frame Perfect

Outside of dedicated notification areas, a GUI should only change state in response to user action. Because the user requested the state change, they naturally know how it changed. This means any animation is a redundant waste of time.

The notification area doesn't need animations either, because a GUI is only appropriate for displaying non-urgent notifications. If something really needs urgent attention, you need alarms and flashing lights, not an animated "toast".

I'd rather have an imperfect frame now than a perfect frame later. Latency should be the top priority for any UI, because when latency is low enough it feels like a part of your own body, which minimizes cognitive load. Animation is especially bad for this, because animations add hundreds of milliseconds of latency.

I think a lot of these are because Apple has built animations into their products as first-class citizens, but that means that they need to somehow figure out how to compose them well. (Which obviously is a rather difficult problem to solve!) In my experience, you end up spending a lot more time trying to get all of the animations to work well together than you do on creating the actual UI, and that time is just not worth it if your start and end states are beautiful and intuitive. There's also the cross-UI-framework tax that has come up since Apple has allowed mixing SwiftUI and (App|UI)Kit, and animations are part of that.

There’s a similar principle of congruence in information visualization, stated in Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics by Heer & Robertson as: “Maintain valid data graphics during transitions. To ensure viewers’ mental models are congruent with the semantics of the data, we suggest that, as much as possible, intermediate interpolation states remain valid data graphics.” https://idl.uw.edu/papers/animated-transitions

I would love to understand these people, really!

On a personal level, if thing works - I say, cool, lets focus on something else now.

But I have worked with people who are similar to the author and we will get into the conversation:

    - they: wait, but the bundle size is 2.4Mb, it can be improved a lot
    - me: by how much? and we have 10k users/day and we have cache policy setup
    - they: we can reduce it to 1Mb, imagine saving 10k*1.4Mb every day
    - me: yeah, but its not costing us much, if you focus on making it perfect your salary will cost us 2 years of outbound traffic cost.
    - they: no, but its not perfect

I admire those people, because they're valuable asset in some companies (e.g. Google scale, saving 1.4Mb for 1 Billion people every day is a lot), but my mind doesn't even want to think about what's perfect.

How do I get there? What are the resources I can read and learn from to look at things to make them perfect?