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Posted by jakelazaroff 9/5/2025

Purposeful animations(emilkowal.ski)
544 points | 133 commentspage 3
webdevver 9/5/2025|
old school bios/DOS interfaces are kings of usability to this day imo. sub 1ms latency, arguably even a little too quick - sometimes it feels like the interface changed right before my input.
btbuildem 7 days ago||
Instead of trying to decide one animation speed for all things, the UI should be adaptive. The author stumbles onto this and walks right past it: whatever raycast is, they use it a lot, and find the animation (any animation) annoying.

The UI should learn the user's patterns: when they're new and unfamiliar, the animations are slower and more deliberate, instructional (initially including more information re: expected workflow). As the user "walks" a certain path again and again, every time more smoothly and confidently, the suggestions / assists / animations diminish, shorten, and disappear. For a pro user with muscle memory and memorized keystroke sequences, the UI does its best to just get out of the way.

willio58 9/5/2025||
YES. I love the examples here. The best one to me is the row background color transition on hover. It's painful, it feels like the UI is sluggish, when it reality it was someone going a little too hard on animation for no reason. Too often we think more animations = better.
Jotalea 6 days ago||
I personally LOVE when the software I use has smooth animations. Telegram, Hyprland, GNOME, iOS, those are some examples of it. but apparently, I am the only person that cares about animations at all. I made a mockup of an app with quite a lot of animations, and asked random people what did they think about it. not a single person mentioned animations.
hollowturtle 7 days ago||
While animations in general may add juice they can also hide better ux, like the feedback button, it's one more click(actually two as it seems not to automatically focus on the textarea once opened) to send feedback. But the more years come by the more it looks being a choice to not have a great ux, in the case of the feedback button one might want to be sure the user intention is to send some
pmontra 7 days ago||
> How often users will see an animation is a key factor in deciding whether to animate or not.

That's the reason why I removed every animation in GNOME on my desktop. I also removed anything that morphs the screen into something else. For example, I don't use the activities screen. I jump to the other virtual desktops with hotkeys.

chromanoid 7 days ago||
At least on desktop screens I think chronostasis might make animations seem more sluggish depending on where you looked before.

I wonder if this leads experienced users of the app in question to not like any animations, because they know click paths better and place their focus in an anticipatory manner.

Maybe one could measure click speed and reduce animation times based on that.

vm012 7 days ago||
I think motion blur could enhance UI animations by making fast transitions feel smoother, even with the low number of frames the animation has to be rendered with. I wonder if this idea has been explored in mainstream UI frameworks, and if not, why - is it too computationally expensive, technically infeasible, or just a bad idea.
modeless 9/5/2025||
Android has really failed at this. Android apps are full of animations that serve no purpose or are even misleading, and slow down the experience. It's cargo cult copying from iOS. And the animations are janky, too.

Luckily Android has a developer option to double the speed of animations system-wide. It's the first thing I turn on every time I get a new phone. I find that double speed is about right. Designers tend to make every animation at least half as fast as it should be, to make sure you notice their effort.

cosmic_cheese 9/5/2025||
One that gets me routinely is Android's two-stage quick control/notification drawer, which is further complicated by gesture-expandable notifications. It feels like a poorly thought out bodge to fit everything into a single screen. It’s annoying to me even as a software developer and must be terribly confusing to someone not well versed in the arcane incantations of mobile operating systems.
const_cast 7 days ago|||
The two-swipe controls are truly evil and I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet. The first screen shows you next to nothing if you have no notifications, which I never do.

Its a lot of work to get to quick control. The 4 they let you see on the first swipe is just not enough.

But wait, there's more! Even after the second swipe you have to swipe back and forth to get to all the controls.

But wait, there's more! In landscape mode the interface goes from difficult to downright infuriating.

modeless 7 days ago|||
Those interactions are kind of annoying but not because of animations.
cosmic_cheese 7 days ago||
I would say that the interaction is enabled by the animation. Without the animation it would be even more nonsensical than it already is and probably wouldn’t have been implemented.
Krssst 7 days ago||
There's an accessibility setting to disable all animations and the result is even better, it feels like living in a future where everything is instantaneous.
OvbiousError 7 days ago|
The one that bites me daily is in keeper. The web UI opens with icons collapsed, expanding after ?500ms?, right about when I want to click on a category to expand it, thus collapsing it again.
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