← Back to context

Comment by jstimpfle

10 hours ago

I agree there are many bad timer-waster animations. But animations can be a good thing. Take scrolling as an example. Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling. A good animation can save a lot of time here. It's similar with other operations -- and I agree that those operations that we don't do that often tend to be the ones that profit more from animation, while the ones where we already know in advance what will happen can be made worse by animation. I think an animation should never slow down the user, they should not be blocking. An unfinished animation should not prevent the user from typing the next action.

> Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling.

We used to be able to look at the scroll bar to keep track.

Furthermore page down/up used to move a full page consistently. But today it might as well be a random amount specific to the application or content. Making it impossible to train muscle memory.