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"Animation is not 'extremely' important and never has been or how would we have survived all these years?"

Animation definitely has an important role to play in interface design and it's been used in applications for decades. For example, this video snippet of Mac OS 7 (released in 1991 - over 25 years ago) shows the animation that occurs when a new finder window opens.

https://youtu.be/f_GBeKVijWQ?t=2m16s

Can you imagine minimizing and maximizing windows without some subtle effect to show the window shrinking or expanding? Without animation, the transition would feel clunky and abrupt.

Animation can be overdone of course (even for minimising a window). And that's the real problem with animation in UI design: when it's used purely for decorative puposes or if it slows you down, it quickly becomes irritating.

Previously, animations were subtle and focused on individual actions (and limited by what the hardware was capable of). Today, animations are smoother, faster but also longer (hence the term "Motion UI") and actions are conveyed with multiple, simultaneous animations. It means that sometimes the UI can feel too busy and overdone with movement.

But maybe it's also a generational thing? Taste and fashion change and perhaps users today aren't fazed or distracted by fast motion graphics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw

⬐ anexprogrammer

A lot of OS animation is async, hence doesn't detract from speed and usability in the slightest. Obvious exception for the OS X full screen animation, which is cute twice, then you google how to make it stop. I'd like fullscreen now, not in 2 seconds thanks.

How do the animations hold up when the machine is being hammered and running heavy CPU and GPU loads? (Or normal use when a user has filled it with malware) Windows holds up far less well than OSX in this regard, but does much better than it used to back in XP days where you could watch it paint the UI piece by painful piece often under surprisingly little load. In that case any animating is not helping anyone. Wireframing minimize/maximize etc mght have been more useful.

Much more phone app animation appears to be synchronous, blocking, so the pretty animation is making the app slower. Every time. It appears often to be there as gloss. That's fine the first day when you don't know the way around, beyond that it's just slowing everyone up.

> But maybe it's also a generational thing? Taste and fashion change and perhaps users today aren't fazed or distracted by fast motion graphics?

LOL please. It's not that I am fazed and distracted by fast motion graphics, it's when it's done badly. I'd hardly call material design fast motion graphics either. MD when done right can be excellent. There's some great material design apps on my phone. I do think they went too far with the current flatten all the things cargo cult, but that's my preference. At least they didnt go as far as W10.

Let's take an example of a delete as given in the OP. We'll ignore the asking "are you sure", OK? :) Can I tap my thumb as fast as I can three times and delete 3 records? Or will I have to wait for it to catch up because of the needless cute collapsing animation? Did you actually delete 3, or just 2 because the middle tap was lost during animation play? That's just bad design for any generation, no?

Make a fast app without need for latency animations, and give me animations that are async so if I've become expert within your app I never see them because my taps cancel them. Give me a latency anim just when the network connection is rubbish, and only as long as it's needed. Now test your cute anims on an older phone, or a phone with something greedy running in background, or latency with a horrible or intemittent net connection...

I LIKE fast motion graphics in games, where they're often not fast enough, and movies :p

⬐ lake99

> Can you imagine minimizing and maximizing windows without some subtle effect to show the window shrinking or expanding?

Easily. I work mostly on Linux, and have turned off all animations. The first time I tried Windows 10, everything felt as slow as molasses. When I turned off animations, I was stunned by how fast Windows 10 was. Opening small apps (terminal, basic editor, etc.) on Linux seemed instantaneous, until I spent some time on Windows 10. Now, Linux seems noticeably slow.

> Without animation, the transition would feel clunky and abrupt.

I tried it out a few times now. It was abrupt, but not clunky. I like it this way.

Completely agree - I'm an Android fan, but it is unbelievable that the performance is still such an issue. Even the Nexus 6P drops frames quite regularly, and that's even with it doing much simpler animations than is common on iOS.

You can see this with the Material Design specs as well - the rendered demo videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw ) from the Design team are amazing, but what's actually been implemented on Android is far less sophisticated and even then they frequently skip frames. Interestingly, many of the Google apps are much closer to the Design specs and perform better on iOS and even on the web, at least in Chrome.

Hopefully this will finally be resolved with the Chrome OS merge (Chrome OS has great performance) - It must be extremely frustrating for the Google Design teams when they can't implement their designs properly on their own platform.

I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise! Like I said, I'm speaking only from intuition.

I have a piece of paper on my desk. I put my hand on it and slide it. It does pretty much what I ask it to. I would say it's 'well behaved'.

If I have some slippery surface and a slippery jell(y|o)-like object, it will wobble. To me, that's a sign that I need to pay more attention to it because it's not 'well behaved'.

Modelling not-well-behaved objects for interfaces seems counter-intuitive and (I suggest) takes more mental energy to interact with. This is the point I (hope I) made above.

As for the rotation, the origin-normalising in my previous comment is both affine and rotational (yes, I didn't consider that when writing it). But if you look at the examples, they also have rotational momentum. Paper doesn't have that, as it's got low mass and is dampened by the friction. The closest I could get to the Facebok examples is waggling a piece of paper about on the end of a stick, or moving a heavy object on a slippery surface, and that's not how I'd model an interface!

I just clicked 'compose' in GMail and the compose 'window' just appears. Likewise in my text editor, and creating a new window in Mac OS Finder and creating a new tab in my browser. Granted, there are lots of subtle (and not so subtle) movements in various operating systems. But it's a world apart from Google's Material Design demo video [0] and the 2d and 3d waggle [1].

Mac OS introduced the bouncing icon in the dock about a 15 years ago. Modal 'sheets' slide down. Ubuntu has things easing in and out. These can be disabled (to a greater or lesser extent) without any problem.

But I think we're going to see a fundamental shift in the paradigm, especially with Material Design, where movement isn't just easing things in and out. It's bringing movement directly into the representation and manipulation of objects.

It's a really cool, novel idea, but may leave some people behind (visually impaired or just, like me, people who prefer minimal movement on screen). Your jarring because the screen suddenly changes is my jarring because everything slides around.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw [1] http://facebook.github.io/origami/examples/

The current Google+ is not material design. Here's more info: http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw&list=PLOU2XLYxms...

Material Design Reel Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TXgCzxEnw There are soft button differences when they display the nexus devices, could these possibly be part of Googles Re-Design for the next Android release?