> Actually I think you should re-read my comment.

Ok, done. Still didn't see anything beyond assertions based on nothing but your own preference, and countering things I said without any support.

> Oh, sorry, I didn't realise I was talking to the world expert on button animations. So do users prefer quadratic or exponential smoothing on their switches?

Of course I didn't say I was the world expert in button animation, but I'm far beyond the age where I feel compelled to pretend random developers' uninformed opinions on design are as useful as mine. Lots of developers get really mad when people point out that that their software development expertise doesn't make them experts in all other fields, but that's a you problem.

> I'm far beyond the age where I feel compelled to pretend random developers' uninformed opinions on design are as useful as mine.

Yet your opinions are also uninformed. Or you've done precious little to convince people otherwise. Perhaps you should make arguments instead of just saying you have experience and it makes you correct. Does acting conceited often convince people of your perspectives? No? Then why do it? Surely telling me your thoughts would be much more convincing than simply asserting that you've had them.

> and countering things I said without any support

You are the one claiming to have numerical evidence to support your conclusions and failing to provide it. I think it is unreasonable to expect me to give that which you cannot.

> You are the one claiming to have numerical evidence to support your conclusions and failing to provide it. I think it is unreasonable to expect me to give that which you cannot.

That appropriately applied animations are a valuable part of interface usability is not controversial. A four second google search will confirm that and I'm not going to do that for you just because you refuse to look. Anyone dismissing the idea out-of-hand based on their own preferences and assumptions has the burden of proof.

> Yet your opinions are also uninformed. Or you've done precious little to convince people otherwise. Perhaps you should make arguments instead of just saying you have experience and it makes you correct. Does acting conceited often convince people of your perspectives? No? Then why do it? Surely telling me your thoughts would be much more convincing than simply asserting that you've had them.

Yes. How conceited of me to not scramble to go grab citations for a bunch of people in a completely different field asserting that they know more about design than designers. Surely if you stumbled upon a bunch of designers making sweeping, arrogant, unsupported declarations about software development and the incompetence of developers, you'd trip over yourself to gather any evidence they demanded to prove your point when you corrected them on their foundational misgivings. Surely you wouldn't just tell them to go google it for themselves.

"Am I out of touch with the current state of design? No: it's the designers who are wrong."

> appropriately applied animations

Appropriately applied anything is good. I am disputing whether this is an appropriate application.

> How conceited of me to not scramble to go grab citations

This what not conceited. There is nothing wrong with not having the numbers for something, you should just try to avoid claiming you do if you can't actually find any. The conceited bit was your general attitude. Writing many lines of text about how much experience you have, how everyone else is stupid and has worthless opinions, etc.

> Surely if you stumbled upon a bunch of designers making sweeping, arrogant, unsupported declarations about software development and the incompetence of developers

I would likely agree with them. Most software is quite bad, and most of it isn't designed much better. When I say a lot of designers are wasting time on this stuff, I base this on developers doing the same thing. If the people making these claims were incorrect about something, I would simply explain why that is rather than saying "I have a bunch of experience that you don't have and there are some studies that prove your silly little feelings wrong. Your opinions are worthless compared to mine." The reason I wouldn't say this is because it's conceited and it doesn't convince anyone of anything.

> "Am I out of touch with the current state of design? No: it's the designers who are wrong."

I am more concerned with what users think than I am with the current trends in design. Anyone can be a designer, that doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.

> Appropriately applied anything is good. I am disputing whether this is an appropriate application.

Ok, explain why this animation is not an appropriate application of this animation in a technical demonstration of this animation.

> I would likely agree with them. Most software is quite bad, and most of it isn't designed much better. When I say a lot of designers are wasting time on this stuff, I base this on developers doing the same thing.

Copout.

> If the people making these claims were incorrect about something, I would simply explain why that is rather than saying "I have a bunch of experience that you don't have and there are some studies that prove your silly little feelings wrong. Your opinions are worthless compared to mine." The reason I wouldn't say this is because it's conceited and it doesn't convince anyone of anything.

Read the comment I wrote initially, where I explained, at length, why the comment I responded to was not correct.

> I am more concerned with what users think than I am with the current trends in design. Anyone can be a designer, that doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.

Yes, anybody can be an anything, and luckily we've got gobs of Dunning-Kreuger mountaineers in the software business to assess their competence.

> Read the comment I wrote initially

This is why I call you conceited – the only reason people can disagree with you is because they are stupid or because they haven't actually read what you said. You seem so confused by the fact that I have read it, and I find it to be unconvincing. You suggest that these switches exist primarily to look pretty, when as I understand it, their main purpose is to communicate that checking them has an immediate effect rather than only after form submission. I don't see them being used like that as much as I just see them jammed in random places, and even when they are I have to wonder if it would make more sense for the UI they are a part of to be made into a form. You dismiss the issue with state identification by saying they could represent "a binary choice between any number of things". The idea that a switch can have more states than just on or off is confusing to me, and that still doesn't help with the issue of determining their state unless you label both sides which is a waste in comparison to the simple checkbox, which draws on the user's existing knowledge from filling in forms on pen-and-paper.

> Copout

I'm sorry that I don't have the opinions you want me to have so that I'm wrong.

>>> Appropriately applied anything is good. I am disputing whether this is an appropriate application.

>> Ok, explain why this animation is not an appropriate application of this animation in a technical demonstration of this animation.

>

Thought so.

> the only reason people can disagree with you is because they are stupid or because they haven't actually read what you said.

What I initially said is based in common industry practice and backed up by papers from academia, independent usability organizations like the Nielsen Norman group, and plenty of other independent entities. It's not secret-- lots of info is a quick google search away. It's nuanced. Lots of the info is in literature about accessibility-specific topics like designing for people with cognitive problems of various stripes, low vision, photosensitive epilepsy and similar conditions, motion sickness, and all sort of other less common neurological considerations. The default state of UI design is not adding anything unless it adds something specific and justifiable and doesn't kill any other sort of accessibility. Lots of interfaces violate those rules. Lots of interfaces are not designed by UI designers. Pointing to bad practices in those interfaces isn't an indictment of UI design or any of the practices that UI designers have. Your refusal to acknowledge all of this doesn't oblige me to gather empirical evidence to defend it.

I also wouldn't go gather a list of citations to defend the concept of OO programming to a crowd of non-or-slightly-technical designers subconsciously influenced by groupthink and a few clojure evangelists they'd worked with, citing code they saw in shitty wordpress plugins and ignorantly insisting OOP was the problem. Right, surely it would have been good code otherwise.

In this comment section, literally zero of the very critical people, you included, has responded with anything aside from some combination of personal preference, developer folk wisdom, and off-base assumptions, all buttressed with mistaken confidence. If you refuse to correct that with all of the info at your fingertips, that's your problem, not mine.

> I'm sorry that I don't havee the opinions you want me to have so that I'm wrong.

Ok let's break this down. A copout is avoiding responsibility for something, and in rhetoric, it's when you avoid addressing a direct point with nonspecific challenges to the premise, or by changing the premise to something that will still let you be right.

For example, "Surely if you stumbled upon a bunch of designers making sweeping, arrogant, unsupported declarations about software development and the incompetence of developers, you'd trip over yourself to gather any evidence they demanded to prove your point when you corrected them on their foundational misgivings. Surely you wouldn't just tell them to go google it for themselves."

This is a very cut-and-dried statement. Here's your verbatim response:

"I would likely agree with them. Most software is quite bad, and most of it isn't designed much better. When I say a lot of designers are wasting time on this stuff, I base this on developers doing the same thing."

Rather than addressing the clear premise of how you'd respond to sweeping, arrogant, and unsupported criticism by arrogant laypeople, you change the premise to one where those designers are making criticisms you agree with. It completely avoids the obvious point, which is that you obviously wouldn't feel the need to cite your arguments in the face of baseless criticism from laypeople.

Go ahead and protect your ego by pretending I disregarded your legitimate response. Limber yourself up for some sort of 5 layer deep mental gymnastics about my being the one that was really changing the premise, or the like. But you're clearly not interested in honestly evaluating the veracity of anything you're saying, so I'm done here.

Most professionals get irritated when randos that think they're experts make a bunch of BS criticism of their professional practices. But developers are unique in that they get equally rankled by implications that knowing how to code doesn't give them expertise in everybody else's fields, too.

> Rather than addressing the clear premise of how you'd respond to sweeping, arrogant, and unsupported criticism by arrogant laypeople

Except I did address that in the next sentence[1]. Maybe you should read my comments before you write all this and accuse me of not reading yours.

> Thought so.

> The default state of UI design is not adding anything unless it adds something specific and justifiable and doesn't kill any other sort of accessibility

I did actually explain why it is not appropriate (that it communicates something specific which is contradictory to the way I often see it used). I'll add that it feels much worse than the native form widgets in websites where I often see it used, and it can degrade usability by being a non-standard input method. I also should point out that the null hypothesis doesn't need explaining. You've said yourself that the default state is not adding something, i.e. assume it is not appropriate until there is evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on you, and that is why I didn't deem that sentence worthy of specific reply.

> In this comment section, literally zero of the very critical people, you included, has responded with anything aside from some combination of personal preference

I don't control the actions of other people. That said, I did as you asked yesterday and looked it up, and the only study I could find said users didn't like toggles[2][3]. Wherever toggles are compared to binary non-toggle options, the other options are preferred though there is a degree of subjectivity to it. The only reason I didn't post it is because I assumed you were already familiar with the literature on the matter.

> Your refusal to acknowledge all of this doesn't oblige me to gather empirical evidence to defend it.

If it is as easy as you claim, it would be a lot less effort than writing all this and it would actually convince me you are correct (which I assume is your objective but it may not be). That seems like a much better option than calling me egotistical and stupid.

[1] "If the people making these claims were incorrect about something, I would simply explain why that is rather than saying "I have a bunch of experience that you don't have and there are some studies that prove your silly little feelings wrong. Your opinions are worthless compared to mine."" - James K (2024)

[2] Plaisant, C., & Wallace, D. (1990). Touchscreen toggle switches: Push or slide? Design issues and usability study (CS-TR-2557, CAR-TR-521). University of Maryland.

[3] Alyaa Al-Jasim and Pietro Murano. 2023. Designing User Interface Toggles for Usability. J. User Exper. 18, 4 (August 2023), 175–199.

Those would be great citations of we were talking about that. This entire conversation and the article it's responding to are discussing UI animation and not the merit of any given UI widget. You're obviously just going to just keep claiming that whatever you kicked the ball into is the goal, so I'm washing my hands of this pedantic mess. Enjoy.

The fact that users prefer a non-animated widget to an animated one seems exceedingly relevant my statement that users prefer widgets that react instantly over animated ones. I would even call it a strengthened goal. If you accept this conclusion, then I have shown more than I needed to prove.