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0 pointsgeokon14d ago0 comments

Do you have some concrete examples?

"Back-in-the-days" you'd click and stuff would instantly happen, and I don't remember anything being more difficult to visually interpret.

On my Kubuntu desktop if I disable all animations (the whole compositor) I don't feel there is an increased cognitive load of rescaning things - but maybe it's my preexisting memory of the UIs and certain baked in UI expectations. Maybe this animated stuff helps people that are computer illiterate? (software made for the lowest common denominator)

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billyp-rva13d ago· 2 in thread

Consider trying to follow along with this app [0] without the transitions. Without them you'd experience much more cognitive load to staying oriented.

[0] https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Ilograph/Request

cyberax13d ago

Well, yeah. This app's UI is horrible. It's both cluttered and sparse. But what's worse, it's ANNOYING.

The key here is that animations happen outside the foveal area. Our vision is tuned to be extremely sensitive to motion and changes _outside_ the foveal area. So when something moves at the corner of your vision, it distracts your attention from your current focus.

This makes a lot of "modern" UI literally anti-productive. It actively _slows_ _down_ people and increases cognitive load.

jstanley13d ago

I think this is actually a perfect example. The animations make it more complicated to follow, not less! If it just highlighted the stuff you were hovered over it would be easy to understand, I honestly don't get the motivation behind the animation.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse