> The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, it must make sense
After reading this blog post, I think the rule of thumb should be "If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment (except during animations), it must make sense". I don’t think making sense during an animation should really be a goal, as long as it makes sense before and after.
Well, this is the exact opposite of his point. Of course it should make sense when not animating! That is given. The entire crux of his point is that it should also make during an animation.
In an ideal world, it is hard to argue with. Yes, sure it should make sense. But also, please don't spend precious cycles on this unless all the other bugs are fixed, and this animation consistency is truly the most important remaining issue to address.
I think you nailed it. Animation nuance is fine to burn time on if you’ve run out of things to do.
It's like you read until that point, but then didn't read the justification for why it makes sense to care about frames during the animation, the author does outline a bunch of reasons why it should make sense during the entire thing.
Maybe I've just spent too many years as a pixel-perfect chasing frontend developer, but things can look very janky if they jump out of place during animations, compared to where they are before/after.
> It's like you read until that point, but then didn't read the justification
My comment starts with "After reading this blog post"; of course I read it, but it left me totally unconvinced, especially because the author doesn’t bother showing good examples: he criticizes these and then leave you with a random raccoon animation and that’s all. For example, I don’t understand what’s wrong with the Youtube animation; it looks perfectly fine to me.
But the author tried to show exactly that, if screenshots during animation don't look sensible, it points to animation as a whole not making sense - it being either messy, overlapping, or confusing - and, in general, eroding the user's trust.
Yes and I disagree. Youtube doesn’t "erode the user’s trust" with an animation that the author of this post finds yanky just because if you take a screenshot in the middle of it you see a frame that no real user sees that doesn’t look good.
I first heard something similar taking motion design classes in art school: every frame should look good. Transitions and animations that have bad in-betweens look bad overall