I'm working on a Git GUI for myself, in which one of my top priorities is making it more understandable than Git's own UI.
I usually dislike animations. I used to disable transitions whereever possible, as they made the UIs feel sluggish. And I still do.
But working on the project made me for the first time really appreciate in practice how much amimations help with understanding. I paid a high price in complexity to add transitions whenever the state of the visual graph changes, and suddenly it was really obvious what was happening. Commits and whole branches were sliding into their new position, and I would go "a-ha! I see" instead of "wtf just happened, what am I looking at now?".
I think this is the trick. Animations as a visual tool for teaching the outcomes of complex behaviors are a very valid usage of animation. There’s that one site that pops up on here occasionally with the fabulous educational topics and tons of animations to relate concepts that I think really drives that point home.
Minimizing animations are nice for showing you where things “went” when you minimize them. But apart from that, most other UI annimations are just eye candy.
I usually dislike animations. I used to disable transitions whereever possible, as they made the UIs feel sluggish. And I still do.
But working on the project made me for the first time really appreciate in practice how much amimations help with understanding. I paid a high price in complexity to add transitions whenever the state of the visual graph changes, and suddenly it was really obvious what was happening. Commits and whole branches were sliding into their new position, and I would go "a-ha! I see" instead of "wtf just happened, what am I looking at now?".
EDIT: Fair warning, it's heavily WIP https://gitlab.com/indigane/visual-git