It’s a good article. But the article’s title is clickbait considering the author is an animation zealot promoting their animation products in the article and linking to their animation course at the end.
As a rule of thumb, UI animations should generally stay under 300ms.
Android designers should follow this, I always have to enable developer mode and toggle animation speeds to 0.5x or disable it entirely because the default is annoyingly slow.
And this has been a dev setting for over a decade, it wouldn’t hurt them to make animation speed selection available to users without this silly dev mode hoop.
As a rule of thumb, UI animations should generally stay under 300ms.
My observtion too, since i fiddled with a registry key for Windows 7’ taskbar autohide. Default was 400 ms and 300 ms felt way snappier, 0 ms even more so.
I use KDE and I set the animation speed to - as fast as the monitor can make it look like an animation.
When I minimise/maximise a window, all I want is to have enough feedback to tell me that the action happened and if 20 frames can do that, I don’t need 50.
The important thing the article is missing, is that you should always respect the prefers-reduced-motion setting. Some people just don’t like animations; either because they are distracting, or because they don’t want to waste battery/cpu on useless things (looking at you, spotify player, using 15% of my cpu for some animated bars…)
I disabled all animations in Android after the recent announcement of a vulnerability in which invisible animations could be used to trick users into unwitting actions. The sudden transitions without animation were a bit odd at first, but I was surprised how much faster and more responsive the phone feels with animations turned off. I like it better this way and feel no need to turn them back on.
Yeah, a few years ago, a friend handed me their iPhone to see, if I could find an option they were looking for. And I was genuinely appalled at how slow everything felt, solely due to the animations. Like, iOS has objectively better UI performance, but then they chose beautiful over usable with the animations and that makes it feel worse in many ways.
To be fair, I do find animations useful. On our work computers they’ve turned off animations by default, and I keep turning them on, because I just need that visual feedback - for instance, did I minimize the window or did the program just crash and the window closed - or I misclicked and closed instead? Just a small visual cue so I know what’s going on.
That being said, iPhone (or Apple in general) animations are horrendously slow.
If minimized, it’s still in the task bar thing.
But that requires an glance down at the taskbar and looking for the icon. If I see the minimize animation, I can jump right to the next thing. And as an added bonus (at least until Windows 11 fucked it up), I immediately get a cue as to where in the taskbar the icon is located.
My pet peeve is websites animating in content at page load like data charts. Just show the dang chart, don’t animate a bar chart unless new data is being added to show real-time content.
