Ashley

This post summoned thoughts I had about Square-Enix's handling of their retro RPGs and how in games like Final Fantasy 4 DS they adopted a habit of just dumping the entire contents of the text window on screen all at once instead of scrolling them out letter by letter, and how depressingly unceremonious that felt. Faster, yes, but it lost the texture of characters "saying" their lines word by word.

In some recent version Android started adding this "overscroll" effect where if you try to scroll past the end of a scroll area all the items on the screen sort of stretch and splay horribly as if by trying to scroll too far you are like stretching a rope slightly. It is repulsive. It is actually nauseating. Like many of the bad ideas in Android, this is a questionable but basically okay idea from iOS that Google copied, put their own point-missing spin on and made much much worse. Anyway the reason I mention this is that I found this effect so disgusting that I actually disabled all animations OS-wide just to kill this one single effect (which I guess is technically classified as an animation), so now I just use my phone in The Alternate Universe Without Animations. This is… sometimes interesting. The way to do this turned out to be this semi hidden developer setting that hasn't always been tested, so I get to see things in a way they aren't meant to be seen. Sometimes items load in in a weird jerky piecemeal that an animation would normally hide.

When it works as expected, it's just a strange tradeoff. I can never get the tactile euphoria of a really good animation, but neither can I be unnerved by a bad animation. I expect nothing of my computer and nothing is given to me. Certain things are a little faster which is nice. Overall I feel less bothered by Turning Off an entire dimension of digital experience than it seems like I ought to be

As an unwilling user of potato computers/phones it's even more important when it starts lagging like crazy and you can be stuck on weird transition frames for sometimes seconds. In these cases the simpler the better I'd say,

Seems like you'd enjoy learning about User Experience Design? Here is an article that describes a bunch about how animations are helpful to users: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation-purpose-ux/

I personally think any animation applied to interactables that takes longer than 100ms is slowing me down and that frustrates me. If the animation is just there to catch my eye, then you succeeded if it plays for roughly 50ms. If the animation itself transfers information it can be longer. How its done depends on the context. For me, the more analogue the animation is the better, just like what you said about the modal scaling instead of fading. However, instead of fading, maybe sliding in from the top would be better? like laying a smaller piece of paper on the paper you interacted with? When it was scaling from the top left corner, it was much better too and had a good side effect. Iirc the nngroups page also had an entire article on loading animations, in the linked one they only briefly talk about skeleton screens, it was said that gradient loading animations that go diagonal are better, somehow it makes us feel like we don't have to wait that long?

I never would have thought of 'flimsy' as a descriptor for this stuff but it feels super appropriate

Other than your first example I agree wholeheartedly. However, at least on mobile, the right animation is more sturdy to my mind than the left. The left almost jitters into existence in its first few frames.

total anecdote, but in 2003 I knew WoW was gonna be huge when I clicked on the "craft" button to make a batch of ingots and the bar started filling. heretofore crafting systems were mostly bodged together from NPC dialog tree scripting, and had never previously had a system for automatically handling large numbers of identical items; here, in the space of one button acting normal, I could see a more serious attempt at capturing the genre than had ever been made

This is the premise of the entire Animator Vs Animation series (now on like... season six?) and is used in some really excellent games (and in There Is No Game). Specifically, the way UI elements are animated gives them character in a way that's just begging to be exploited for storytelling, or at least for comedy.

Honestly I think that sort of levity is what's missing in modern operating systems. If you really want to get everyone to stop using Windows as their gaming OS, then make a windowing system that's just a little too bouncy to be taken seriously. Not so bouncy that it's unusable (this was The Joke that carried the first act of Homestuck) but bouncy enough. Like, if I'm using a free OS which is held together with rubber bands and glue, I want it to feel like it's made of rubber bands and glue, too; I don't want it to look at me with a straight face and act like it has no clue what I'm so upset about (while I'm knee-deep in Old Settings Menus and config files).

This is why I use Comic Mono as my terminal font, by the way.