Animations are VITAL [LWN.net]

Animations are VITAL

Posted Jun 25, 2011 6:52 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Nokia's N9 handset launched by pboddie
Parent article: Nokia's N9 handset launched

This just shows that "you don't exist" :-)

Joel said it best: Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels.

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them - and that means companies who sell phones (Nokia in particular) absolutely, positively, need them. Yes, they are useless. Yes, they waste power and screen space. But without them you can sell your phones (except to few geeks who are not affected by "pretty pixels") and if you don't sell phones your company will go bankrupt.

It took me a long time to understand this. Epiphany was achieved when I've "solved" problem of my niece's slow computer. I found out that ICQ sometimes use all four cores to do what knows what and offered to replace it with Miranda IM (very lightweight messenger). The first question was: "how to download skins or at least make it less ugly". The second one was: "how to install better smiles". Only after that questions about what the thing can actually do and how to do that followed.

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Animations are VITAL

Posted Jun 25, 2011 13:54 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them

Animations can give important visual clues, but the best ones do not involve "bling" which is what I and the other commenter were referring to. I admit that some special effects can be quite nice - KDE 3's icon-bar tooltips are nicer than the overused yellow tooltips that used to appear (and which can still be enabled by changing the settings) - but for many users, busy user interfaces and things rushing around all over the screen can add to their confusion.

Some of these observations can be "generational": young people whose experiences have been formed by playing with GUI-based technology from infancy are perhaps a lot better equipped to deal with busy user interfaces because they're probably accustomed to filtering things out, but observe older people and you will see how confusing even a small dose of "bling" can be.