I recently removed all animations from my android and the zero latency blows me away, it's like it got instantly way faster. Wish i could do that for the web
Most of the sins of the modern web can be easily undone
What has happened to desktop UIs since the 90s has been tragic. We've made some minor specific advances in the last 20 years, but dropped the ball on some really fundamental concepts. It hurts whenever I have to slog through a shitload of monochromatic nondescript icons with no tooltips until I finally find what I need five minutes later. Mobile phones are slathered in useless animations that make using them feel like molasses, and this is starting to show up in desktop software too. Finding software that has an information density level appropriate for somebody over the age of 12 is becoming pretty hard.
Most of this could be easily undone, but it won't be. Rest assured that whatever is going to cause you the most pain is what will happen.
The lack of chrome is such a frustrating design trend. In Windows 10 in particular I find it so difficult to find the .. well, windows because everything just kind of blends together. There’s something to be said about the workaday utility of how things used to be. They weren’t necessarily beautiful in a conventional sense but they were so much more intuitive.
The real problem is the lack of configurability. You could change the window border width to anywhere from invisible to some insanely huge number on the older versions of Windows, and everyone would be happy. Now you're forced to use whatever some stupid "designer"'s idea is.
The funny thing is back in Windows 7 and earlier I would tweak my theme to have the thinnest borders possible yet I still didn’t have the whole “where is my window” issue. All those customization options went away starting with Windows 8 when some UI designers decided they knew better than me how my windows should look.
Thanks for those links - I’ll play around with those options to see if I can restore some sanity to my desktop.
It turns the "just shoving windows around and resizing them" from something normal into an act which only a surgeon could feel comfortable with. The mouse is not a scalpel, it's a tool, and if I need to hit a 1px wide border edge (or even worse the corner) in order to resize a window, then it's a terribly bad UI.
I loved SGI IRIX's brutally bold borders, but those of Windows 7 are still just as good.
Truth is, we had knobs and switches, then typewriters which naturally transition to command line, then we had window managers which are like a desk(top) covered in papers. Then we had... well that’s all we have. I guess the next thing is AR/VR and 3D UIs but until then...
A mobile phone or tablet UI I would say is like a spiral bound pocket notebook, as compared to the proper desktop metaphor of full laptop/desktop computers.
It’s like trying to reinvent the book. It _can_ be enhanced, but most of the time it doesn’t change the overall reading experience.
Animations on mobile are not always useless. They act as a feedback mechanism on a medium like touch screen where there is none otherwise. They can also work to compensate for delays. The perception of delay can be reduced by showing an animation while doing another task in the background.
There are better feedback mechanisms. Like, flash the button if it's being touched. At no point should an animation make the task take longer than it would otherwise.
How about just not doing any of that and making the task itself go faster?
I have a problem with this "animations hiding delays" pattern, because it's straight-up dishonest and disrespectful. If the computer has to take time, let me know; if it doesn't, just give me the results immediately. Stop running what would be a piece of background feedback about the state of my machine through a low-pass filter!
Adding animations to software tends to make it slower (a good potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy here). Often enough, the animations are of fixed "developer's best estimate" length, and can take longer than the task itself, slowing the user down.
The whole idea behind "reducing perception of delay" seems to be borne out of paternalistic and exploitative thinking, "how to make the user feel better about our app, despite its shortcomings". Trying to make the user like you more than they should. Instead of that, why not focus on ensuring the user is maximally effective in getting maximum value out of the application - that they're not confused, and not waiting for the machine?
For the web, if you have the right accessibility settings in your operating system or browser, then the prefers-reduced-motion media query should tell sites not to show you animations.
Not many developers explicitly add support for this, but it's included in eg bootstrap.
Oh how I wish I could do this on macOS. Yes there is a "reduce motion" setting but there is no remove motion setting and a whole bunch of animations remain most notably minimize/maximize of windows (I can at least change from the default Genie effect to Scale which is faster), opening an application it still "zooms" into the screen, etc.
I would happily pay for a third party app to nuke every single damn animation if I could but Apple make it impossible (or at least that is what is claimed).
And of course this doesn't even touch on how laggy resizing many applications on macOS is (yes even on the shiny new M1 models). The Microsoft Office suite, Chrome and a whole bunch of other applications are horrible when resizing. It isn't often an issue with Apple's applications for what that's worth.
Oh I know every single tweak out there, sadly many no longer work in Big Sur. But even before that you have not been able to fully disable every animation in macOS for as long as I can remember.
Windows XP and perhaps newer versions of Windows included a setting to only redraw a window after the user has finished moving/resizing. You would instead see an outline of the new window position/size. The same applied to (un)minimizing. I don’t know about such a setting in MacOS.
Even in Windows 10 you can still go to the "old style" (Windows 2000 days) settings screen and adjust for "best performance" which disables close to every UI enhancement Windows supports. Drop shadows on windows and desktop icons, drawing windows on resize (as you mentioned), taskbar animations, scrollbar animations and even small visual effects such as the subtle animations when you mouse over a control in a window.
Obviously not many people wish to disable everything but having the option to do so is great and something I wish macOS would let me do as there is way too much motion in macOS. Sure it was cute 15 years ago when the idea of a beautiful and fluid UI was impressive but in 2021 they annoy me or worse they make the whole system look crap when, for some reason, the animations lag.
If your OS has a "reduce motion" option (I know windows and mac do), many websites are starting to obey this as an accessibility requirement.
I actually noticed this when I accidentally disabled animations on a few websites I visit by disabling them at the OS level. Unfortunately the website animations actually made things easier to use, so I had to turn the painful OS animations back on to get the website animations back.
...in a browser that supports user stylesheets, which unfortunately means only Firefox and IE, by default. It's possible to work around that with extensions, however.
Thanks for this post. Just turned off all animations on my android phone and you weren't kidding, the difference is pretty incredible.
For anyone who doesn't know, the setting is in developer options on android 9 at least. There's several animation scale settings, they can be increased, decreased or turned off. Turning them all off removed the animations.
Careful, some apps seem to rely on those animations. Uber, I've found, has issues displaying the location of the vehicle if I set them all to 0.0. No problem if I set them to 0.5.
"Battery Saver" mode also automatically disables some of the animations, so it would be interesting to see if you got a boost from removing the animations without enabling Battery Saver.
Most of the sins of the modern web can be easily undone