I’ve always hated the Apple-style infinitely-long animated web pages where the scroll wheel just moves stuff around on the page rather than scrolling. All that does is add confusion and make me work harder to see actual content. It’s an obfuscation mechanism. The motion is impressive for about 5 seconds, the first time you encounter it, then it’s just annoying—a triumph of “art” over functionality. Admittedly, I see this a lot in less splashy ways. For example, light gray type on a dark gray background is a slap in the face of basic usability, but some “artist” insisted on it, customers be damned.
The thinking that leads to things like animation is really ingrained in the artist mindset. Artists realize an internal vision that is not customer-driven—in fact, customer-driven art is universally bad art. A UX engineer, conversely, focuses entirely on user needs. The two perspectives are often at odds, but you need both art and UX in a good website. The skill comes in reconciling these two points of view—art without compromising usability.
Recently, I came across the new Affinity Studio site, which uses the same tired motion nonsense in spades, but also has a “Reduce motion” button that turns off the idiocy and lets the scroll button scroll. Here we have politics made visible—the user-experience camp fighting against the art camp. Somebody seems to have asked the users what’s best, and the art camp is reluctantly allowing the UX folks to turn off their precious animation in the face of user indifference. Two sites superimposed is NOT a solution, though; it’s indecision and equivocation made visible.
The cost is, of course, nontrivial. They’re building two websites: a less expensive, usable page overlaid on a vastly more costly animated page that no customer is asking for. Seems like a waste of time and money to me.
The more critical issue is the organization’s inability to make a decision. Given two ideological camps, both win, which is to say, nobody wins. More than doubling development costs is a lose-lose proposition. This is organizational schizophrenia, not compromise. Psychological safety—the ability to disagree, and even argue, without repercussion—is missing in these organizations. Avoidance is not safety. Compromise is a disease. We need consent—to experiment with one of the two choices, for example—not compromise.
This situation indicates an inability to collaborate. A good collaboration is a melding of strengths, not a “design by committee” compromise. Of course, collaboration requires psychological safety, so it’s really a secondary effect.
We also need to make decisions. I once had a particularly frustrating client who refused to decide anything. The entire spec was littered with “do a, b, c, or d, as specified in the configuration.” That file got so complicated they wrote a programming language to specify config—literally making the user write the program for them.
This sort of throw-in-the-kitchen-sink design is not uncommon, of course. That doesn’t make it good
