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Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

This is often intentional. Take a look at any OS or software with animations. Slowness for slowness sake. The macOS spaces change has such a slow animation, it's completely useless. Actually, macOS has a ton of animations to slow things down, but luckily most can be turned off. Not the spaces thing. Android animations are unbearable and slow things down majorly. Luckily they can be turned off, but only by unlocking developer mode and going in there. It's clear whoever designed these things has never heard of UX in their lives. And since these products are coming from companies like Google and Apple, which have UX teams, it leads me to think that most UX people are complete idiots. Or UX is simply not a priority at all and these companies are too stupid to assemble a UX team for their products. Hard to say which is the case.

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Or, perhaps, maybe you're just not the target audience and those animations are designed as visual indicators for less experienced users?

Those animations are absolutely a product of well researched UX design, it's just design that's intended to make the UI more accessible by showing users the flow of information and how the structure of the interface changes in a visual manner, rather then design intended to address the needs of power users. The animations used in the Spaces feature on MacOS is a good example of that, where apps and desktops slide and zoom around to make it absolutely obvious that the apps you have open haven't just disappeared. That's quite important for a fairly advanced desktop manipulation feature like that.

Modern operating systems are designed for broad audiences, and that includes people who aren't as savvy with technology as we are. That means accepting some level of tradeoffs between the speed that pro users want, and UI accessibility that necessitates slowing things down somewhat. In the case of desktop OS's there's still usually ways for power users to disable that stuff and of course Terminal for those who don't really need a UI at all. And then there's a lot of different flavors of Linux that make no attempt at appealing to a less technical audience.

But just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean the UX team are "idiots" or that the companies are "stupid". The amount of novice or casual users is orders of magnitude higher then power users who care only about efficiency, and for better or worse those users always come first.

I'll believe they have UX teams when they offer an easily accessible option to turn those things off. There's zero reason why they can't target both use cases with a simple toggle to turn animations on and off. The stupidity is expanded when this exists but is not easily accessible. Those that haven't thought of that yet are indeed stupid (Apple). Some videogames have the same issue with unskippable cut scenes. Am I not the target audience there either? If not, then who is? Who wants to watch the same cut-scene a thousand times? The UX is equally horrific in both cases and in both cases, clearly no thought went into the UX whatsoever.

The spaces transition seems relatively fast for me with Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion on. This switches it from sliding to crossfade.

Locating the window I'm looking for takes longer than the animation and I can start looking immediately during the fade. Even with the ctrl+number shortcuts, I can't get my hands back onto the home row before the animation finishes.

Hands back to home row? Mine never left. The fade is a little better, almost usable, but not quite. Certainly not something I want to see hundreds of times a day while I'm trying to get work done. Same problem with full screen apps which also use this system.

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