Comment by fasterik

> I think it's almost always wrong to move something discontinuously

Yes, I think we agree. When a thing is becoming a larger/smaller form of itself in a different place, it can be useful to cue the relationship visually with motion. But there are times when the change or displacement is minor enough, I do prefer 'just do it', even when the animation is hyper-fast. It's just more visual/cognitive clutter.

It's obviously situational, and if such motion is always very fast, consistent and well-motivated, it never rises to the level of annoying me. I might personally prefer some instances where, if the position overlaps and the size change is minor, just skipping it, but it's not 'bad'. I think the key may be that, done properly, such motion should cognitively be a 'barely there' hint. The moment a state-change animation rises to having perceivable aesthetic value, like being 'pleasing', it's too much.

As the senior product owner, I once had a new designer argue that if an animation was as fast as I wanted, no one would be able to appreciate the excellent S-curve ease-in/out. :-) I had to explain if a simple state-change animation was slow enough to be consciously 'appreciated', it had failed in its purpose.

> waiting for an animation to complete before the app will start acknowledging my keystrokes.

Or you find out you can input as the animation happens, but when the animation finishes, you’ve lost where your input ended up and don’t know if you can backspace/delete and retype.

(Yes, I’m expressing multiple issues here w/ui & animation & input)

Animations on software are infuriatingly slow these days. I turn on dev mode on my android phone for 2 settings. DPI and double animation speed. Simply to compensate for software design taking up too much space and time. On windows I turn animations off for the same reason. Just let me use the thing.

... I wonder if we're seeing a downstream effect of Apple rejecting Flash on iPhone, triggering a slow collapse of Adobe empire. It seems that there are multiple concepts missing in conversations going on here.