[pimlottc]

Off topic, but I really hate this trend of using animate-in transitions for _every_ _single_ _section_ of the page. Why I do always have to scroll into a half a window's worth of blank background before the content appears with some cutesy slide-in animation? I could perhaps forgive it if it was just badly implemented lazy-loading images but it also does this for simple section titles and body text as well. It ends up taking twice the time to read since you have to keep waiting for text to appear. It also looks quite bizarre if you refresh the page while scrolled to the bottom and then scroll back up.

To be clear, this is not a complaint about tying dynamic effects to scroll position. Apple does those all the time [0][1][2] but at least you will never have a big gap of blank content at the bottom of the page, usually there is fresh content continously immediately visible as you are scrolling. I don't even mind if there is a bit of initial page-loading animation at the start, as long as it's just once.

Does anyone really prefer reading pages like this? It just seems very disrespectful of the user's time, forcing them to continuously wait just to read your promotional copy.

0: https://www.apple.com/iphone-13-pro/

1: https://www.apple.com/watch/

2: https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/

[toomanydoubts]

Dude, we are hype and cool and we have the power of JS and CSS transitions at our fingertips. Why should we sacrifice our amazing experience that all end-users love just to please some purist-wannabe power user who enjoys to read content without hindrances, delays and amazing visual effects based on carefully-calculated bezier curves by our best-of-class team?

[systemvoltage]

100%. I don't get all this negativity! I love animations and wasteful frivolous effects. They really jazz up my day. Huge typography, rounded buttons, and massive amounts of negative space reduces stress, and improves my mental health. Really does the job! I don't think I can ever go back to "good ol" days of "functional design". Pfff...it is all so boring. I like mindless consumption and basically buy anything I see in an ad.

[alexb_]

Wasteful, frivolous, and "fashionable" is exactly who Apple is marketing towards. You aren't the target audience here.

[ovao]

In this case there’s no value added, no. That’s okay in some cases, but the purpose of this page is to communicate the value of Facebook Pay, and this doesn’t really help. And it’s badly done too: kinda janky on some components and easing is weirdly inconsistent.

Visual stability is actually kinda underrated.

[pimlottc]

“Visual stability” is a good way to talk about it, thanks for the term. I think part of the issue is the unpredictability of not knowing where and when the next bit of text is going to appear :P

[blackcadillacs]

I agree and would even go as far as to say that I don't like tying dynamic effects to scroll position at all. Those Apple sites are "cool", but they're hard to parse. If I want to find some piece of info again, it's not easy.

Really wish animations would go away for the most part. They make sites and tools take longer and force the user to pause between actions when they may not need to otherwise. If the animation contributes something, fine, but if the purpose of a site is to show off pictures and text, just leave the animations out of it.

[pimlottc]

I do agree that animation, when used, should be a deliberate and thoughtful choice. Sometimes animations are helpful to show a connection between two things, illustrate change or show contrast. A designer should have always ask, what value does animation add here? How does it strengthen communication and understanding? Animation can be a great tool when appropriate but shouldn’t just be a mindless default.

[marginalia_nu]

I think it's a phase.

I remember there were a lot of powerpoint presentations that did this back in the day as well, along with "clipart" cartoon noises with every transition. It's really fun to produce a presentation like that, but everyone collectively agreed that it was pretty tedious relatively quickly.

[kingcharles]

This shit has a name these days.. it's called "scrollytelling".

[pimlottc]

Ah, thanks, I had not heard this term before!

I do think it has its place for some things but it’s just very badly done here for no real purpose.

[aemreunal]

The same "scroll-to-load" thing is on Apple News' article images as well and it drives me up the wall. It's nothing but bad UX.

[jdrc]

it s like watching a clockwork from the 17th century. It's gotten old