digitalBush

Let me preface this bash by saying that I use my computer to work. As such, I expect it to respond when I ask it to do so. If I click a button, I want an instant response.

We live in an interesting time in computing. We're finally getting to the point where we have excess CPU cycles to spare and gobs of memory. What is a developer to do? Well, any good developer would make sure to use the equipment to it's fullest potential. Instead of just showing a window, let's take 500ms to animate that window flying across the screen. Let's take 700ms to fade this object in instead of making it just appear. Of course the last couple of statements were intended as sarcasm and the numbers were made up. Still, there's a point to be made, and I promise I'm getting there.

Why in the world would we create hardware that's faster only to slow down the user experience? I'm sick of animations that make me wait for them to finish before I can do something. If I click a link to your web page, please don't fade the damn thing in. I clicked a link and traditionally the view port blanks out and new content appears. I'm already incurring overhead by requesting your web server to do something, please don't make me wait any longer because you think something looks cool. To me, to be cool is to give me what I want as quickly as possible. If I click on an item in the task bar, I'd rather not watch an effect while my window comes up and into the foreground (I'm looking at you Vista). It's just plain counter-productive.

I'm not totally against animations; they do have their place. I think animations are appropriate when the UI does something that's not expected. The digg website is a prime example. When you click the login link at the top, a login bar appears above the header bar. This isn't normal, and if it didn't fade in the user might miss the fact that the bar just appeared. In that instance, the login bar needs to draw attention to itself.

There are plenty of examples both good and bad here. I just want to point out that we as developers needs to be mindful of our users. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.