I generally agree, but I'd add that animations and transitions don't have to just be functional. They can add a lot of delight for users. I've had a lot of non-designers tell me about Square just because of how tasteful and slick the animations were. Consider that: people had to pay for something and thought it was cool enough to tell people about. In other words, they nailed the "experience" part of "user experience." I don't think Square (or Clear) would've achieved that without those nice little animations.

We should always proceed with caution when it comes to doing flashy things, but noticing them isn't always so bad :-)


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Transitions are very like makeup. If the user notices them, you may be doing something wrong. They should blend into the entire experience and be natural. Some of the examples in that article are good, like showing things coming from something you clicked on (another example of this is the OSX dock) or moving to a sub-page using a wipe effect.

VisualEditor is using a couple animations (powered by CSS3, woot!) to make visual connections between different states. I think it really has helped make the user interface feel smooth and fluid - but in experimenting with them I've also found it's possible to make an interface feel less responsive, and even really annoying.

Gotta know when the improvement ends and the flashy (read cheesy) effects start.

- Trevor

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I haven't tried this guy's recent product, Thinglist, but his example of todo list Clear is definitely a very good example of the concept he's talking about. I just started using it on mobile and desktop. 


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Munaf Assaf <massaf@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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