I don't mind animation in general, but I hate smooth scrolling (first thing I disable when installing any browser).
There is a trend of adding fake smooth scrolling using js/css, unfortunately.
Allow disabling of motion or animation
51–60 of 132 posts
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally get where you're coming from, most employment of CSS animate and transition is excessive and reduces UX. The rule is that you should never have to wait for a UI animation - That said, UI animations done correctly, which are subtle and extremely short, do enhance perception of UI controls state and transitions. But I can't blame people for the broad hate towards animation on the web, so much of it is done po…
I have only once seen a UI animation that I didn't have to wait for. This was in the Metacity window manager, which had an option to animate windows minimizing/maximizing using a wireframe of their outline that could not be interacted with. The actual window moved immediately, and the wireframe did not obscure much of the screen while it moved. I would still turn them off, but if every UI animation was designed like…
That is a great design. Shows you where the minimized window is (in case your brain missed it) without making you wait. I would love to see an entire UI designed around the principle of "don't make me wait. Ever."
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#53No post body was provided.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all animations are an issue. Disabling all animations would be too much. That’s why the website needs to decide for each animation if it should be affected by prefers-reduced-motion. The browser cannot make this decision¹. 1. Maybe in 100 years, when we have powerful AI that and reliably identify problematic animation.
Counterpoint: iOS has this flag, Duolingo FAQ says this is the only way to turn off animations on iOS: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058189572-... Unfortunately, Duolingo ignores this flag for many animations, and more than half of the screens are still animated. I find the animations Duolingo uses to be obnoxious distractions, and I want them to be actually disabled when I tell it this. I also wa…
Speaking of iOS, Arc - whilst being a handy location/places tracker - has some of the worst UX I've ever seen. Doing almost anything involves swoops and fades and shifts - and this is with "Reduce Motion" turned on. If I suffered from motion sickness, I'd delete the app because it would knock me sideways every time.
(eg. to confirm an unconfirmed item, you tap on a coloured bar which then swoops a new pane from the right, shifts it up, zooms the map, and occasionally does a little blink refresh of the map. And you frequently get 4-5 of these a day, each one doing its little UI dance. God help you if you need to convert 10+ mis-identified transport segments to a single bus...)
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#55Why does even the thought of 'disabling' animations have to be cast in the context of an accessibility issue? What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done? I get it, if you're building a webpage maybe that's your artistic vision, and I'm specifically railing on OS animations, but the question still stan…
Good example of ignoring users is the Google Photos app, which has an option to turn off motion photo playback, but turning it off just makes a shorter, even more jarring animation instead. Its actually nauseating, and impossible to disable, without reverting to static photos only (I let it record motion photos because its often helpful to catch an action frame you'd otherwise miss, but I want to choose when to playback, not google)
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that's your artistic vision > “look at my mad skills” I’m torn about this: there are enough unneeded and horrible animations that I completely understand this point of view of wanted to get rid of all of them. I also see that as throwing the baby with the bath water. There’s also fundamentally useful and informative animations to tell you something changed, what you’re supposed to do with an element or even what ty…
>As an unintentional experiment, when I got my new phone a few weeks ago I checked “disable animations” first and foremost, and started using the device normally. And everytime I was doing a specific action the screen froze with a round arrow. It took me 5 min to understand that page and app transitions where, well, “animations”, and getting rid of them made for a broken experience. I don't get it. That sounds like t…
It isn't a hard coded timer, it's the "loading" animation you see while an app or a page bootstraps a new view. In macos it would be the equivalent of the spinning beach ball.
In iOS I think there is just no way to disable all the animations, while android gives you that switch that is quite literal.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree - prefers-reduced-motion is a user-controlled OS-level setting (like prefers-color-scheme) which apps and websites should do their best to respect. Sadly we live in a world where developer time is a cost, and the cost of respecting user preferences is way down the list of things to spend cash/time on ... unless, of course, an A/B test showing that common courtesy leads to better conversions gets deployed and…
If you're so tight on time that you can't add a simple wrapper to your CSS rule, why bother with adding animations at all?
It’s often not a matter of “add a wrapper to this one CSS rule” but rather, “add a wrapper to ALL of these rules and some of this inline CSS scattered everywhere”.
This is why, as part of a baseline of proper software engineering, it’s so important to get into a configurability/feature flag mindset, right from the start.
If every feature is treated as something toggleable - if every color and padding value is a variable, and every visible string of text is wrapped in a function call that just returns the string, right from the start, then things like turning off animation, making colors more contrasting, or translating on-screen text to another language becomes magnitudes simpler when you do need it.
This is where I have a problem with the pervasiveness of the YAGNI mindset. So many of these things fall right onto the YAGNI sword.
Sure, you can get carried away with premature optimization, for example, but there are so many simple habits developers can and should develop that, once established, will add virtually no time or complexity to what you’re building but will save time and complexity in spades later on.
And if you truly “ain’t gonna need it”, then you still benefit from a more disciplined code structure.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#58It's a bit crap that this needs conscious work by developers to implement - I feel like with just a little more thought put into the CSS spec itself, that animations could have defaulted to following the user's OS settings unless the dev explicitly marked them as necessary. Edit: not meaning to absolve developers of thinking about a11y, or to accuse css spec designers of negligence, just making the point that a syste…
Well, the issue is that since our tools already give us arbitrary power over what the user sees, then of course the developer has to opt-in to either using a subset of tools (e.g. some animation API that the OS can toggle) or implement the override like in TFA.
I don't really think you can force people to use a restrictive animation API (and nothing else) since it would have to generalize over all animation needs. Meanwhile, on iOS, SwiftUI is very far from generalizing over all needs—as an example of what a restrictive set of tools might look like. I don't think it's even possible, and the imperative kit will always have to exist.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#59Why does even the thought of 'disabling' animations have to be cast in the context of an accessibility issue? What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done? I get it, if you're building a webpage maybe that's your artistic vision, and I'm specifically railing on OS animations, but the question still stan…
There is a trend that when a goal can't be achieved directly, people try to push it through some other channel. In this case, accessibility can be mandatory in some cases (by law or specification) while "don't be an asshole to your users" is not.
It's hard to tell for sure where it's just a happy coincidence and where it is a pretext to make it either more appealing or to force people to do it under some other requirement, but you see this everywhere
- Some hostile "optimization" ideas by airlines getting nixed by safety arguments, certainly not at all influenced (/s) by the humans working at those regulators not wanting other humans to be subjected to that
- Animal rights activists using climate change as the main argument because it's a more popular topic now
- People trying to ban technical terms like "blacklist"/"whitelist" claiming the goal is more precise terminology
I'm sure there are plenty more examples.
Re: Allow disabling of motion or animation
#60Also, it would be great if Apple could let us disable the pull to refresh gesture in safari.