Several years ago, the number one complaint you could read on this forum on Firefox was that Chrome felt snappier.

Firefox is irrelevant today because the supposedly highly sophisticated users decided based on feel.

Smooth animation performance was a major point of iOS over Android for years.

I see plenty of evidence of sophisticated users deciding based on the factors you dismiss.

Smooth animations > janky animations, always, but that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether something that doesn't need to be animated should be animated.

I prefer programs I perceive as "snappier" -- and to me, a part of "snappiness" is choosing not to animate things unnecessarily.

Some animations can be essential for user experience. One of them is demoed in the page: the page scroll animation.

If you've ever looked at a wall of text or other high entropy information displayed on the screen, especially if it was on a shared screen so the image is all you can see with no hints about the scroll direction, keeping up with the motion can be nigh impossible. You have the whole image jumping up and down several lines or even a full page at a time and you spend all your brain power trying to find an "anchor" reference point to realize what that movement was, instead of focusing on the content.

In such cases even the most subtle of animations that tells me how the image moved is a treasure.

The vast majority of scrolling is done for the benefit of the person initiating it. It's a good point that you might want an optional animation mode for the the benefit of spectators, but it should be disabled by default. My short term memory lasts more than one second, so I don't need to be reminded that I just scrolled down after I scroll down.

User testing disagrees. Most people find an instantly refreshing screen of text to be quite dazzling. Developers look at screens of text all day long-- they're much more tolerant to those sorts of transitions than most people are, and basing defaults on their usage styles is one of the reason most people find FOSS interfaces completely awful.

Most users only see animated scrolling at work (not genuine "smooth scrolling" tied to continuous touchscreen or touchpad input, which is unobjectionable, but playback of canned animations following completed input events). They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.

> They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.

My friend, this is weapon's grade ignorance, and this is a very, very charitable characterization. Your big idea is that people want these continuous transitions because they can waste a few minutes per day looking at them and be paid for it?

Any person working together with someone else on large documents and their endless reviews, and definitely anyone who often has to follow documents on a shared screen knows the benefits of transition between states. Something that allows the eyes and brain to track the motion. Objects in real life don't jump between locations instantly so nothing about people is trained to follow such instant transitions. The fewer the cues about how things moved, the harder it is to follow.

The users' fingers don't jump between locations instantly. That already provides the motion cue. UI animations are additional motion added after the natural motion has already completed.

And I already agreed that animation can be beneficial to spectators, who don't have access to the natural motion cue, but that's a small fraction of total use.

> They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.

Oh good lord: what an incredibly patronizing sentiment. If design makes an interface slower for its users to use, it's a bad design. What developers-- used to looking at entirely text-based interfaces and command lines-- expect in interface feedback is much different from what others expect from it. If it's a tool for which developers are a core group of users, it should communicate using their expected set of visual signals.

It's an major confounding factor in all productivity studies, and IMO underappreciated because UI researchers generally don't want to get involved in politics. Social status depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth. When the owning class takes approximately 100% of the generated wealth from improvements, the direct effects of improved productivity only hurt the worker. (They gain indirectly, because improved productivity helps society as a whole, but the marginal gain to the worker from any individual improvement is always small, so there's a tragedy of the commons here and the incentive is always to resist improvements.)

What an astonishingly bizarre non sequitur. Are you implying that someone's socioeconomic status affects how they perceive animations in interfaces?

Yes. I believe professionals are less tolerant of time-wasting UIs, in part because they stand to gain a larger proportion of the wealth produced by productivity improvements. If a faster UI just means you do more work while your boss gets richer, why would you want one?

> Most "non-technical" people use computers, especially desktops, in a professional setting. Navigating those UIs is part of their jobs and they will spent hours upon hours doing so.

Yes, but they still reason about those interfaces totally differently. This isn't a quantitative difference in competence, it's a qualitative difference in approach.

> Pretty animations may make a good first impressions but they get old and annoying very fast. It is a huge mistake in UI design to only optimize for smooth on-boarding of new users and not for long term productivity.

Animations that stick out as 'being animated' are rarely desirable. I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage.

> The reason most end-user-facing FOSS projects (that don't have foundation-funded UI teams like Blender or Mozilla

> Blender has great UI because they are dog-fooding their own software through blender studio. Meaning because they are the users and develop UI based on their own needs, contradicting your theory.

Do you have any actual evidence for the assertion that Blender's UI designers don't actually drive the usability of the software?

> Firefox UI has gotten significantly WORSE over time and the browser is becoming irrelevant based on market share. Now that is not all the fault of the UI but it is still worth noting that the height of firefox popularity was when it had a very power-user friendly UI that all that fancy "UI experts" would hate. Maybe they should replace the "foundation-funded" UI team.

You're substituting your opinion for fact. Mozilla's design team publishes a lot of stuff. If you think it's wrong, there's lots of specifics available for you to counter.

> As for commercial software, modern UI is so bad that many "non-technical" users actively hate using computers and feel absolutely powerless when errors occur. Modern UI is actively user-hostile.

This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument.

> I assure you that you don't notice most of the animations you benefit from in your usage.

I assure you, I do notice them. I am disabling them everywhere I can. I disable them in my Desktop Environment, I disable them on my Android smartphone. I am way more productive without them.

Now, I don't hate animations per se. On the contrary as I dabble in game dev I find them crucial to "juice up" a game. They have their place but that is not productivity software that people are forced to use daily. They are for play not work.

> This is a common trope among developers who think their feelings about interface design carry more weight than the research that actually tests these things. It holds about as much weight as any other feelings vs facts argument.

Many open source devs are users of their software. You are making a false dichotomy where developer are some special creatures with totally different needs. I like what I like. There is no such thing as an "average user". People have different needs. Making software for the lowest common denominator will create UI that will be miserable for everyone to use.

Now I am willing to listen to actual academic studies about UI design and productivity but your acting like some corporate internal studies are actually legit science is silly. We all know this things are are more drive by corporate politics.

> I assure you, I do notice them. I am disabling them everywhere I can. I disable them in my Desktop Environment, I disable them on my Android smartphone. I am way more productive without them. Now, I don't hate animations per se. On the contrary as I dabble in game dev I find them crucial to "juice up" a game. They have their place but that is not productivity software that people are forced to use daily. They are for play not work.

a) Ok so you disable mouseovers on all interface elements to indicate whether or not you're going to hit a click target, indicators of where windows are moving when you drag them and click indicator animations to show that you clicked on it, the minute amount of fadeout during the click animation on a number pad so you can enter values quickly while still seeing what keys you pressed, indicators for where something minimizes to or maximizes from, progress bars, blinking cursors, notifications... sure thing. If you think most UI animations are even remotely comparable to game UI animations, we're definitely not talking about the same animations

> Now I am willing to listen to actual academic studies about UI design and productivity but your acting like some corporate internal studies are actually legit science is silly. We all know this things are are more drive by corporate politics.

I'm not talking about internal corporate usability studies. Ideally, you should probably google something before you try explaining a field to a professional that works in that field.

> Many open source devs are users of their software. You are making a false dichotomy where developer are some special creatures with totally different needs. I like what I like. There is no such thing as an "average user". People have different needs. Making software for the lowest common denominator will create UI that will be miserable for everyone to use.

Firstly, judging whether or not software is usable by looking at the handful of people that already use it and built it is like polling people to see if the dinner they cooked themselves last night should win a cooking competition. If the goal of your software is only to serve the people that wrote it, then it doesn't matter. But the vast majority of open-source software is made for other people to use, too which is why they post it publicly on the internet. I've contributed probably 10k hours of coding time to FOSS projects, all of which had the specific goal of serving people outside of the small pool of maintainers.

Secondly, you accuse me of treating developers like they're special but then say that design which doesn't focus on developers' workflows is coding to the lowest common denominator. Gotcha.

Thirdly, the entire point of the discipline of interface design is breaking the idea that there is an average user. How do we accomplish that? By not letting people make unilateral decisions about design based on their assumptions and folk wisdom, consult existing data that influences how we proceed, and test our assumptions on the people who actually use the software. If you're saying that developers unilaterally making design decisions are more open to different usage styles than a designer that is specifically looking at people's usage, I'm not really sure how to address that.