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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

"Numerous researches have discovered that optimal speed for interface animation is between 200 and 500 ms"

They are still too slow.

If you have an android phone, go into developer options and turn animation scale to 0.5x (animation duration is halved, so they are twice as fast). You'll be amazed how much faster the OS feels.

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Did this on a jailbroken iPhone once and I found the effect over time to give me the feeling of being frantic. I think the speed of these animations are chosen for various reasons, and serenity is an important part of how you feel in general while using the device. Just like you would need to teach a self-driving car not to accelerate too fast, your mind has similar expectations about what’s a comfortable pace.

Interesting. I usually try to disable animation entirely, but that sounds plausible. Did you try to disable animations and did it make a difference?

On iPhone the animation speed was/is there to help give apps time to launch, for example, so while the app is launching you see the animation and it hides the fact of the app launch time. If you disable the animation / speed it up, sometimes you run into apps that you notice are unresponsive until they have finished launching. You can’t disable the animation completely, but you can reduce the animation time to as low as it can go. This was a while ago as I haven’t been jailbroken for a few years now. What I describe above is my experience with “disabling” the animations.

I think there are two factors causing developers to choose too-long animations:

1. Pride. We worked hard to build this animation, and the user is damn well going to watch it! Because they'll definitely like it as much as we do. (This is an example of not putting the user first.)

2. Inaccurate conclusions from user testing. I think users go through two phases. Early on, they don't know their way around the UI and can't navigate quickly. Plus the animations are novel and they're still enjoying them as eye candy. So for two reasons, they don't mind slower animations. As they use the UI for days or weeks, both these factors flip. You start navigating the UI by muscle memory, and novelty is gone. Thus you can only find the optimal animation speed by testing how a user feels about it after weeks of usage, which isn't how user testing is usually done.

Fun fact: The default Start Menu pop-up delay in Windows XP was 400ms. Once of the first things I always did was reduce it to <100ms on every new machine I used.

While for you (and most of us here) that delay was too slow, it also served a purpose -- users who can barely hold the mouse would diagonally go from parent to e.g. 4th child element too slowly and lose the submenu on the way, because it would disappear after the same delay if cursor was not on parent-or-child. Otoh, windows devs could arguably make it independent and the problem could disappear.

In short, with 100ms you have to go ¬-shaped and with 400ms you can go \-shaped.

Same here, I miss the days of Microsoft Windows XP PowerToys

Now almost nothing UX-based is configurable

On my last phone I turned the animations off complete, and then with my latest I'm waiting until I want a new phone to turn them off to give me a breath of fresh air.

In contrast, on early Android 2 phones, I did the opposite -- increasing animation time to 2x. It felt smoother. I'd argue, that animation can cover unresponsiveness of application, and improve perception of performance.

Why not just tell the user something is taking long to calculate or load (maxbe due slow network)?

You need very high frame rate to make fast animations feel smooth and natural. I suppose older Android phones had quite low frame rate and required slow animations to feel smooth.

Imagine moving a window 500px over 100ms in 30FPS, that is just 3 frames! It means your window will jump 166px per frame. On average resolution display this translates to a few centimers jump per frame. Not very smooth.

I turn off animations entirely on my phones, and when watching others use their phones I'm always baffled by how slow they feel.

However, I've notice Android occasionally uses animation to convey things to the user, so I'll try your idea of halving it.

Yeah, I initially turned off animations on my phone maybe a year ago or so. Works great unless you occasionally play games (QuizUp for example!). Then animations needs to be able to show something, otherwise the game UI is laggy. Setting the animation scale to 0.5x fixed the issue, and still my UI feels very snappy.

If you turn one of the three animation settings to 0 on a Keyone phone, the popup to choose charge/fast charge/data connection when connecting to USB doesn't appear and there's no alternative way to select it.

I forget which but stuck with 0.5x for that reason.

Best tip ever! My phone feels snappy again!

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