On May 3, 2012, at 11:57 PM, Jim Witte wrote:
On 29 Apr 2012, at 12:07 AM, Alex Zavatone wrote:
Who is trying to "entertain the programmers" with bouncy, elastic scrollViews?
's not entertainment, any more than buttons that light up when you click them are, or windows that move in real time as you drag them.
I’m thinking this would make the basis for some tee-shirt like the “Developers Developers Developers Developers!” shirt back in 2004..
Anyway, the beginning of this thread was elastic scrollviews. Elastic scrollbars are possibly more of a problem than just “wasting time” - because programmers as opposed to “ordinary users” (using Word or TextEdit or whatever) are probably more likely to scroll down to the bottom of the window and “hit the end". Having the window “bounce” makes it harder to visually comprehend and lock on to the text until it stops moving (which probably takes at least 1/4 second).
And I wonder how much of the “time wasted” is really “real” rather than just psychological. As long as the processor can keep up with doing the animation while still taking care of other things the user is doing - how much time does a panel slide/expand/etc animation really take up?
Well, I think you hit that part of the nail on the head. When something bounces that takes up a large part of your field of vision, or startlingly pops up in your face, or in a large part of your field of vision swoops in or out of the screen, in a darting or abrupt motion, it is startling, abrupt, unpleasant and distracting.
This makes you more ill at ease with the system every time it happens.
Where I see the big problem with Apple's GUI designs are these two factors:
- useless animations that stop your momentum by forcing you to wait for it to finish
- animations that make the user more ill at ease the more they use the system.
I fly through apps because I learn the command keys, I type fast and get on a fast momentum. When I hit a key for an action and have to pause - even for a split second - to wait for the GUI to finish, it prevents me from maintaining my momentum and actually helps to slow me down, and makes using the app just a little more frustrating. Xcode 4 has enough problems, don't make it suck more. When we hit command 1, we know the left navigator will display, we asked Xcode to display it, so don't make us wait to see it.
Show it RIGHT AWAY.
Other factors such as bouncing elastic scroll bars, dialogs that grow and pop like they are coming right at you, or the idiotic email send animation where the entire message swoops up to the top of the screen, and the so so terrible Safari "new" window that pops open like it's coming at you, are FINE when they are taking up a very small portion of the screen, but are unsettling and unpleasant in large screens. Every time one happens, it increases the user's feeling of being ill at ease with the system. This reinforces dislike of the system every time it happens - and for Apple to give the users these poor methods of interaction on the Mac with no official method to turn them off, clearly shows terrible judgement in upper level management and feature design departments
Bouncing or elastic scroll bars may be fine on touch devices with smaller screens. When scrolling with a mouse set to fast, scrolling with momentum and flicking the middle part of the mouse, our goal is to get to the other part of the document as fast as reasonably possible. IF the screen's contents "go elastic" or bounce when reaching the end of the scroll region, this is an insult to the user when we must wait for the bounce to finish and visually disconcerting (for part of the scrolling) because the content moves opposite to the way that you scrolled when it bounces back. And it makes you wait in the process.
This has two impressions on the user, 1 moment of unpleasant startling, 1 moment of "crap, I have to wait for this?"
Waiting for a split second because the GUI forces you to, dents your momentum and makes you dislike the GUI that made you wait.
When we are coding, we are trying to get our task done AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. Do not use the GUI's capability to put barriers up in front of the user who is trying to get their job done.
Anything that may be irritating to the user, let them turn it off.
We do not exist to use an overly flourishy operating system. The system exists to satisfy our needs. These bouncing scroll bars and fluffy animations DO. NOT. SOLVE. OUR. NEEDS.
DO NOT force us to use them by not allowing us to turn them off.
And fix this idiotic behaviour based GUI where it's a simple mess to just display a window with only the Console. Yes, I have watched the WWDC videos on how to do this. Yes, it is overly complicated. Stop this. Open Window Console. That's it. Don't make it any more complicated than that.