alt Hacker NewsAs the other user alluded to, Animations are not actually there for people who are comfortable using a computer. The vast majority of users are borderlines in capable of using the internet these days. Animations are supposed to be there to really help guide these users into understanding what the scary machine is doing when they click it. Can they be overused, absolutely, but i think have an accordion fold out animated is a reasonable case. You gotta remember your average user isnt paying any fucking attention, so drawing their attention to important changes on screen is not only good but necessary. I'd prefer no animations ever, but i also dont own an iphone while the majority of the world either does or wants to.
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If it is for those people who barely grasp the slightest thing about what’s going on on-screen, I could grant them that, if they’d let me turn it off. In the days before jailbreak became basically impossible, setting the animation duration to zero was a blessed, incredibly satisfying thing. It’s exactly what I want. Just do the transition in zero seconds.
My iPhone 15 can’t even catch my first 1-2 keystrokes on the keyboard, multiple times a day, but boy howdy does it have the time and the cycles to animate that f*%ker into view. The disrespect for my time and my needs is so obvious.
That's the positive interpretation, but none of the discussions I've had with UI designers or managers have been about adding animation for accessibility, and the zeitgeist of the last decade has been that skeuomorphism (of which intuitive animations are a subset) is passé.
So far as I can tell, all that the stakeholders want from the UI, animations included, is pizzazz.