Smooth animations > janky animations, always, but that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether something that doesn't need to be animated should be animated.
I prefer programs I perceive as "snappier" -- and to me, a part of "snappiness" is choosing not to animate things unnecessarily.
Some animations can be essential for user experience. One of them is demoed in the page: the page scroll animation.
If you've ever looked at a wall of text or other high entropy information displayed on the screen, especially if it was on a shared screen so the image is all you can see with no hints about the scroll direction, keeping up with the motion can be nigh impossible. You have the whole image jumping up and down several lines or even a full page at a time and you spend all your brain power trying to find an "anchor" reference point to realize what that movement was, instead of focusing on the content.
In such cases even the most subtle of animations that tells me how the image moved is a treasure.
The vast majority of scrolling is done for the benefit of the person initiating it. It's a good point that you might want an optional animation mode for the the benefit of spectators, but it should be disabled by default. My short term memory lasts more than one second, so I don't need to be reminded that I just scrolled down after I scroll down.
User testing disagrees. Most people find an instantly refreshing screen of text to be quite dazzling. Developers look at screens of text all day long-- they're much more tolerant to those sorts of transitions than most people are, and basing defaults on their usage styles is one of the reason most people find FOSS interfaces completely awful.
Most users only see animated scrolling at work (not genuine "smooth scrolling" tied to continuous touchscreen or touchpad input, which is unobjectionable, but playback of canned animations following completed input events). They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.
> They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.
My friend, this is weapon's grade ignorance, and this is a very, very charitable characterization. Your big idea is that people want these continuous transitions because they can waste a few minutes per day looking at them and be paid for it?
Any person working together with someone else on large documents and their endless reviews, and definitely anyone who often has to follow documents on a shared screen knows the benefits of transition between states. Something that allows the eyes and brain to track the motion. Objects in real life don't jump between locations instantly so nothing about people is trained to follow such instant transitions. The fewer the cues about how things moved, the harder it is to follow.
The users' fingers don't jump between locations instantly. That already provides the motion cue. UI animations are additional motion added after the natural motion has already completed.
And I already agreed that animation can be beneficial to spectators, who don't have access to the natural motion cue, but that's a small fraction of total use.
> They have an obvious incentive to like it: they're getting paid for doing nothing.
Oh good lord: what an incredibly patronizing sentiment. If design makes an interface slower for its users to use, it's a bad design. What developers-- used to looking at entirely text-based interfaces and command lines-- expect in interface feedback is much different from what others expect from it. If it's a tool for which developers are a core group of users, it should communicate using their expected set of visual signals.
It's an major confounding factor in all productivity studies, and IMO underappreciated because UI researchers generally don't want to get involved in politics. Social status depends more on relative wealth than absolute wealth. When the owning class takes approximately 100% of the generated wealth from improvements, the direct effects of improved productivity only hurt the worker. (They gain indirectly, because improved productivity helps society as a whole, but the marginal gain to the worker from any individual improvement is always small, so there's a tragedy of the commons here and the incentive is always to resist improvements.)
Yes. I believe professionals are less tolerant of time-wasting UIs, in part because they stand to gain a larger proportion of the wealth produced by productivity improvements. If a faster UI just means you do more work while your boss gets richer, why would you want one?
I prefer programs I perceive as "snappier" -- and to me, a part of "snappiness" is choosing not to animate things unnecessarily.