Comment by freeone3000

5 days ago

I’d focus more on print usability and readability guidelines than computer guidelines. 5Hz eink is closer to a moving newspaper than a slow computer.

https://www.mediapoint.com.au/design-tips/composition-layout... might be moderately helpful.

But my advice: do not count on anything refreshing ever. Do not have animations, or transitions. Preload things to the correct spaces, then fill in. Reserve fixed white areas for output, and then fill in with black. (This works much better than the reverse!)

For quite long running processes, it might be worth having it behind a second page load.

> But my advice: do not count on anything refreshing ever. Do not have animations, or transitions. Preload things to the correct spaces, then fill in. Reserve fixed white areas for output, and then fill in with black. (This works much better than the reverse!)

I would ammend to this that if you have an operation that can't complete quickly, it's better to have some kind of animation, even if it's notably slower than the already-slow screen refresh so that the user can tell that there's something happening.

  • The Bigme's boot screen has a 1 Hz animation of the outlined logo filling in with black letter by letter which looks pretty decent in my opinion.

I'd kill for regular UIs that did this.

  • Out of curiosity: Why?

    • I'm constantly hitting the wrong button because some animation shifted it, some dialog popped over shit, or some notification decided now was a good time to cover the thing I was trying to do. The animations make things feel sluggish. And they don't even look good.

      The only advice that doesn't improve all UIs is the bit about filling in with white and adding black after.

      12 replies →

That's a good shout, surprised this didn't occur to me actually as I was only recently dealing with a print-based feature at work. That's a helpful link, much appreciated.