[therealasdf]

That's a good point. I think there is necessary and unnecessary animations. The 1password animation mentioned in the article is absolutely unnecessary. Animations should only be used to help the user understand what is happening and they should be fast. There's no reason why a user should wait for an animation to continue doing what they intended to do.

I think a useful way to accomplish a nice compromise between beautiful interfaces and usability is to allow the user to skip animations. For example, if I start typing after an action was performed the animation should skip to the end. In this case the user is clearly familiar with the interface and knows what they want to do next.