We enjoyed the article Mission Transition, in which Mark Cossey explores and illustrates the role of transitions in user experience design. One example shows iOS transitions in slow motion revealing subtle choices that are simple but not obvious.
In the pre-web early 90s we were very focused on creating short simple transitions that helped users move from one state to the next, maybe even with a smile. We had a VHS tape of SIGCHI demos exploring the role of animation in user interface.
From that tape we pieced together the following truthy guideline: "It takes the brain about a second to move from one state to the next. Any animation that takes about a second and helps the user understand the relationship between the new state and the previous state creates greater user confidence and satisfaction. Any animation that takes much longer is wasting the user's time."
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The web shifted the focus of interactive media design away from niceties like animated transitions to clearly designed pages and navigation schemes. The browser handled transitions completely. Initial interaction with hypertext was snappy but once you clicked the web browser would serve up a big blank page and a wait, sometimes long enough to forget what the previous page looked like.
For a while nifty transitions got a bad name because people mostly only saw them in Flash apps that boasted little else.
Modern web and mobile apps, along with speedy processors, have put transitions back into designer hands. It's great to see designers thinking about them in detail.
We do keep in mind that transitions that are nice on a small screen can be unsettling on a large screen. It took me a while to get used to some of the full screen transitions in OS X Lion. As it turns out I was not the only one to experience motion sickness with the new UI.
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