| > that's your artistic vision > “look at my mad skills” I’m torn about this: there are enough unneeded and horrible animations that I completely understand this point of view of wanted to get rid of all of them. I also see that as throwing the baby with the bath water. There’s also fundamentally useful and informative animations to tell you something changed, what you’re supposed to do with an element or even what type of content you’re looking at. As an unintentional experiment, when I got my new phone a few weeks ago I checked “disable animations” first and foremost, and started using the device normally. And everytime I was doing a specific action the screen froze with a round arrow. It took me 5 min to understand that page and app transitions where, well, “animations”, and getting rid of them made for a broken experience. Same for popups and dialogs. Did it come from the top of the screen or from somewhere else in the app ? If you saw the animation you’d understand it immediately, before even parsing the design of the popup or the content. I think we’re far away from the time where animations where random animated gifs with no meaning, and platforms are mature enough to use them in more advanced and useful ways most of the time. |
I, too, was a bit confused at the frozen arrow in the beginning, until I realized it was just the loading indicator used when animations are disabled (they could probably improve that one). It is the one place where some sort of movement might still be appropriate.
Anyway, I recently disabled this feature due to it breaking the scroll behaviour in Play Store. Ironically the only app (I've noticed) that uses animation for scrolling in a way that makes this accessibility feature break it, making it a very jarring experience.
Instead, I went into developer tools and scaled all animations down to 0.5x. This at least makes all the annoying transitions bearable. I think this setting should also be exposed under accessibility settings.