Every time I see animation discussed by designers, they're thinking about it in terms of polish and "delight", and then balancing those things with perceptual latency. It's not entirely incorrect, but a couple of minor nits:

1. Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

2. It's more useful to think about state when deciding when to animate. Could the user have trouble perceiving the change in state that just occurred? If so, then use an animation to help them visualize what happened. I believe this is the primary reason to use an animation - all others are vanity.

> Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

If (and that’s a big if) animation is used in moderation only when it actually communicates something and isn’t an active impedence (as demonstrated in the linked post), I think it has a significant effect for users. It’s just not the effect that many might expect.

Meaningful, unintrusive animations are one of the myriad puzzle pieces that come together to form a positive impression. They’re a sizeable chunk of that last 20% that separates “good” and “excellent” in users’ minds. They’re not strictly necessary, but between two equally good competitors they’ll help one pull ahead of the other, because users come away with a stronger impression of “solidness”. It’s not unlike how people tend to consider heft and resistance to flexing as markers of higher quality in physical products.

The problem is that since a decade or so ago, UI design as a whole has veered heavily in the direction of vibes, slideshow wow factor, and “branding value” (I felt a pang of nausea just writing that) and away from the volumes of well-researched best practices, and regard for good use of animation has been lost along with it. We’re well overdue for a correction that pushes UI design back in the direction of practical usability and away from Dribbble appeal.

Fully agreeing with this. I was also surprised that the appearance change of a button on mousedown is considered an animation here. ("Another purposeful animation is this subtle scale down effect when pressing a button.")

Isn't this just very basic optical feedback to indicate that a component is clickable at all and that the click was registered?

> Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

Appreciating delight (for it's own sake) in software design I'd consider a core trait of (old-school?) Apple fans. E.g., lamenting the decline of whimsy in the post-Jobs era.

I don't know of a canonical piece that summarizes this idea, but it's referenced a bit in this short piece https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/festivitas

I think there's truth to it being relatively niche, appreciating delight that is, but it's certainly not confined just to designers. E.g., like I'm saying here, a core trait of Apple fans is appreciating these kinds of details.

The other problem I encounter is designers working in B2B, but designing like they're working in B2C.

For B2B (especially enterprise B2B), your software is just a tool your customers' employees need for their day jobs. Fancy animations, multi-colored gradients (because gradients mean "AI" now, right), and other gaudy crap does not make it easier for anyone to do their job. It's just noise -- constantly distracting users who are just trying to navigate through dense, text-heavy dashboards.

If you want to design "pretty" and "delightful" experiences, then it doesn't make much sense to join a company that revolves around CRM/ERP workflows. Work for a company whose value is directly tied to users' warm and fuzzy feelings.

Delight sounds similar to what game designers call "juice" and, done well, it really does make a game feel delightful beyond its pure gameplay.

I've had the same feeling with more utilitarian interfaces, but it's pretty rare. I don't know why. I expect it's partly because we have different expectations for programs than we do for games, partly because the context and the interactions are pretty different, and partly because most organizations do not have the will or the ability to make interfaces that satisfying. (After all, it's the worst sort of thing for most organizations: something that requires taste, time and experience and cannot be managed, measured or executed by committee.)

> 1. Delight is overblown, in my opinion

I might delight in seeing an animation the first three times, after that I want it off. Don't add extra latency to my process.

I can tell you from experience that impressive hero banners and animations that get the user's attention reduce bounce rate. That might not matter if you're established and you get customers via product market fit and word of mouth, but for small shops trying to land early customers it's crucial.

> Could the user have trouble perceiving the change in state that just occurred? If so, then use an animation to help them visualize what happened

I think this is the only justified use of animation in UI, however I wasn't satisfied with the dilemma of increasing perceived transition while increasing perceived UI latency.

I found it's possible to get the best of both for event triggered state changes i.e clicking on stuff, by sticking to ease-out based transitions, where the start of the transition is instant and the end decelerates.

This makes it feel just as snappy as no animation, while still helping to communicate a transition, because we are more sensitive to the latency of the start of the transition when it's an event - since we are anticipating a reaction, which is satisfied as soon as it starts to react.

> Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

I disagree with this, as much as I want it to be true. Just ask an Apple/iPhone user to use an Android phone for a week and then ask them how the experience was, they'll tell you something felt off or janky about it, and a lot of it comes down to really well designed animations on iOS for everything you interact with.

Regular consumers may not use the word delight to describe the user experience, but they do notice it when faced with what is (to them) an inferior experience.

>1. Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

If you go in and read TFA you'll see that's one of the main points being made.

> Delight is overblown, in my opinion

Nerdsnipe perpetuated by other engineers/designers admiring it on Twitter. Nothing wrong with that, just shouldn’t pretend that most users care.

Those designers aren't good at their job. What you're describing is a failed artist. There are a lot of these that call themselves designers.