The animation clarifies the change. A user, heck even I could be confused by an instantaneous touch toggle. Why? Because my finger covers it during the press, so I would not see the change happen - if my mindset was "change that setting", I might rapidly tap it again, thinking the press didn't register. Such confusion does not occur with a (fast) animated transition.
The map example is much more important. With animation, your eyes and brain recognizes a single image sliding around, giving you automatic positional awareness. Without, you eyes and brain recognize a slideshow of independent images, and makes recognizing and navigating the map a conscious effort. By no means an impossible effort, but an entirely unnecessary one detrimental to the user experience.
At the same time, navigation UIs that react as navigation-less updates also tend to have the double-whammy of bad UX in the form of blocking and discarding user input during updates.
Bad UIs are not bad because animations are bad, they're bad because they were made poorly.
Isn't that a problem that UI designes (sorry for generalisation) created by themself? Let's stick to the toggle element. It replaces the classic checkbox.
A "checked checkbox" leaves no doubt. A toggle box does.
It's absolutely not that simple. I actually think that the toggle design is _very_ clever, explicitly because it sidesteps a lot of cultural baggage that comes with existing symbols, and creates its own, fairly unambiguous one.
Do you use "checkmark" to indicate that a choice is selected? In some cultures that indicates "wrong" answer.
This is a problem if using "tri-state" checkboxes. Don't. They're confusing.
It is not a realistic problem for two-state checkboxes.
I'm from nordic country, and yes, I too have seen the "checkmark" to indicate mistake on school work as listed on the Wikipedia page and attributed to Sweden and Finland. I've however also seen that on my son's school work in the UK. And I've seen it used for correct. And for just "I've checked this".
It is not culturally consistent, and usually appears to be more indicative of a personal marking style.
And almost only in that kind of context.
Outside of that context, a checkmark is still mostly used as a positive confirmation across the Nordic countries too. You may want to make sure that the wording of the label does not give room for thinking you can tick it to answer "no", but that equally applies for a checkmark.
To make sure I wasn't overlooking some difference between Norway (where I grew up) and Sweden, I just checked aftonbladet.se - one of Swedens largest newspaper, and their signup page for example uses checkmarks to positively indicate the presence of features in their Swedish ad copy.
On a form it certainly is consistently meant to indicate "selected", just as an "x" is, in those countries as well unless the form explicitly says otherwise or indicates you can use both.
The only confusion arises if both are valid states because you've used a tri-state checkbox. So don't. They're confusing everywhere.
Maybe it's not universal, but the use of checkmarks outside boxes to indicate "wrong" in some contexts is entirely irrelevant to the interpretation of checkmarks in boxes on a form where the options are not-marked vs marked.
Sure, if you are designing a UI where you are displaying corrections to something, don't display a checkmark - probably irrespective of whether you include a box - without some additional indicator of whether it means right or wrong.
few things in the world are perceived as instantaneous, except maybe lightning. until recently people were not used to interacting with instantaneous objects. even a checkbox, in its original incarnation with pen and paper, would take a second to be filled. as long as the animation is interruptible, and the underlying change happens quickly (whatever the toggle is controlling) then animating the transition is usually better. I really like that their animation is interruptible.
The map example is much more important. With animation, your eyes and brain recognizes a single image sliding around, giving you automatic positional awareness. Without, you eyes and brain recognize a slideshow of independent images, and makes recognizing and navigating the map a conscious effort. By no means an impossible effort, but an entirely unnecessary one detrimental to the user experience.
At the same time, navigation UIs that react as navigation-less updates also tend to have the double-whammy of bad UX in the form of blocking and discarding user input during updates.
Bad UIs are not bad because animations are bad, they're bad because they were made poorly.