When does my wallet slide slightly from the magnetic center and then back into place most often? When I’m getting it out of my pocket.
When am I trying to just use my goddamn phone the most? When I get it out of my pocket.
So, it ends up being that ~50% of the time I need to use my phone, I have to wait for that goddamn 3 second animation first.
If some engineer introduced a 3 second regression in the time for Face ID to unlock your phone 50% of the time, it would be noticed and fixed immediately. But call that 3 second regression a “surprise and delight animation” and suddenly Apple designers love it and force it on you.
Siri can be in the middle of responding to a request from my phone when I dock it to my Magsafe charger on my desk, and it obliterates the request like it never happened. Also, cannot use the phone for about 3 seconds after docking it. The green "your phone is charging!" animation takes precedence over all.
That one falls into the category of UX felony as far as I'm concerned. It's not just delay or confusion, but actively misrepresenting a value.
apple have completely lost the plot, and organisations of that size are incapable of producing good user experience w/o a de facto dictatorship person who has an idea what here doing (a la steve jobs)
this is worsened by the the fact that even on hn people have no idea what's they're doing in terms of design most of the time, because they fail to realise that the average person isn't like a fan of their product lol, they just see it as a utility that needs to perform a bare minimum of functions reliably, with a consistent ui, like thats literally it...
every time you want to change something, ask yourself, if I show this to my grandma, and unless her reaction is "omg yes this is a million times better, pls do that" DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING
I dislike smooth scroll (and many other UI animations), but there are other things that might help, such as:
- Xaw scroll bars; click to scroll so that the clicked position is now at the top of the screen.
- Line numbers.
- Marker for bottom and top of previous scroll position, if what was previously on the screen is still visible.
OTOH this article is basically downstream of Apple’s interface design philosophy.
That's just one example because it just happened, but this happens ALL the time. I know Apple can do better. My Android phone felt so much more responsive (the 120hz screen helped, I'm sure), simply because the animations were snappier.
Other examples that come to mind real quick:
- Swiping up to switch apps. That one is awfully slow. (Actually, most gesture-based activities are painfully slow!)
- Dismissing notifications (esp. on Mac)
- Opening the drawer thing
- Revealing the dock
- Sometimes I see animations stacked upon each other. One animation has to fully complete, then another one, THEN I can finally use my computer again.
It's ironic that I have to go to Accessibility settings and disable these things to make my device accessible.