Animate with Purpose—or Not at All

Animations improve UX only when purposeful and fast. For frequent or keyboard-driven actions, avoid animations to keep interactions instant. Use delight sparingly and optimize micro-interactions like tooltips to feel responsive without accidental triggers.

Key Points

• Animate with purpose: to explain, provide feedback, preserve spatial continuity, or intentionally delight—never just for aesthetics.
• Consider frequency: high-frequency interactions (especially keyboard-driven) should be instantaneous; often, no animation is best.
• Favor speed: keep UI animations short (generally under ~300ms) to enhance perceived performance and responsiveness.
• Design micro-interactions thoughtfully: e.g., tooltips should have a slight initial delay but switch to instant, no-delay behavior once active.
• Delight sparingly: animations that wow users should appear in low-frequency contexts; repeated exposure turns delight into friction.

Sentiment

Mostly positive toward the article’s premise. The majority agrees with purposeful, fast, and restrained animations, strong opt-out controls, and prioritizing perceived speed and reliability; dissent centers on selective value of delight/marketing motion and debates over exact durations and implementation quality.

In Agreement

• Animations should primarily communicate state changes, causality, and spatial relationships; anything else is often vanity.
• Keep animations fast (generally under 200–300ms; many prefer ~150–200ms) and fully interruptible; never block input.
• High-frequency and keyboard-driven actions should feel instant; for many of these the best animation is none.
• Delight is overemphasized; polish should come after reliability (“make it less glitchy before more glitzy”).
• Honor accessibility and user control (prefers-reduced-motion, explicit zero-motion settings, speed controls).
• Use motion to aid novices or large state changes; reduce or remove it as users gain proficiency (adaptive motion).
• Micro-interactions like immediate button feedback and smart tooltip timing help without adding latency.
• Place feedback near the triggering action; toasts and distant notifications are often anti-patterns, especially on large screens.

Opposed

• Delight can matter: tasteful motion differentiates products and can improve perceived quality; Apple fans often value it.
• Marketing contexts may benefit from attention-grabbing animations (e.g., hero banners) that reduce bounce rates.
• Animations can aid third-party observers (e.g., during screen sharing) who can’t see the user’s inputs.
• Some consider very short transitions (e.g., ~150ms) too brief to convey state; others argue 300ms is still too slow—timing preferences vary.
• The article’s examples draw criticism: angled marketing animations may distract or reduce readability; button scaling can look glitchy.
• Calls for empirical studies: assertions about motion and perceived performance need stronger research backing.
• A subset argues for near-total elimination of animations as a principle (instantaneous UIs, TUI nostalgia), going beyond the article’s balanced stance.