5 tweaks that would improve iOS 7's new motion design.
It’s all about feeling attractive. Being in almost devine control. Apple’s motion designers are masters of giving us that experience. But this time they need a little tweaking advice.
I’ve focused on the animations that we experience the most. They simply have to feel seamless (almost invisible), yet completely and utterly awesome. And your real life movements need to continue in the digital space without any kind of loss, making it feel like an extension of your body. But this is still a compensation, since we haven’t mastered telekinesis yet.
The animations might feel great when you initially experience them. But I suggest that you test drive each animation multiple times to really sense how it feels, before making your own judgement.
Tweak #1 — Turning your device on and off
How to improve
I’m very much in favor of choosing an animation that might actually be slightly longer in real time, if it actually feels better than the faster counterpart. But in this case I think Apple’s motion designers might have missed that last iteration before heading to lunch.
When turning on they are fading in (while scaling slightly up) the lock screen and when turning off, they are again fading it out (while scaling it down) — in the same speed. It feels great the first couple of hundred times, but then it starts feeling like walking behind an old lady just before the elevator doors close. I suggest that they fade it in a bit faster. Maybe 35% faster. And then keep the fade out as is —making you enjoy the fact that the lock screen keeps fading out in synch with you putting your iPhone in your pocket.
Tweak #2 — Open camera from lock screen
How to improve
You open the camera from the lock screen by “throwing” the screen upwards. Doing that feels really clumpsy in iOS 7. It still needs to be as easy and fast to throw it, but by adding a bit of inertia (resistance) to the throw, I believe it would feel more natural.
Tweak #3 — Entering the home screen
How to improve
Apple has introduced a new way of making us feel even more in flow when using iOS. By never really breaking the stream of animations when interacting with the interface by literally jumping in and out of apps, we never really feel lost. Brilliant improvement. It just makes you flow like buttermilk.
Apple are kicking off that feeling when entering the home screen from the lock screen. The app icons “fall down” onto the home screen around the center of the screen. Looks awesome. But after a hundred times it starts feeling like a frustrating block that I just want to get past .. faster.
I suggest that the icons start animating in closer to the home screen like they are almost appearing (fading in while scaling) out of thin air (now they are almost flying through your head — like apps pouring out of your brain). Then I’d use a tighter (exponential easing) animation that is faster in the beginning and then slows down only right at the end, before the apps are touching the surface of the screen, while speeding the entire animation up about 10-15%.
Tweak #4 — Zooming in and out of the app icons
How to improve
As mentioned in Tweak #3, the buttermilk flows by making us jump from the home screen and right into the app and back again.
It’s like walking from a main hall into a room, walking back out in the main hall and then into a new room very quickly after. In real life you’d probably start speeding up to get faster to what you are looking for.
Besides speeding the animation up about 20%, I’d apply that thinking to the animation design, by gradually speeding it up the more jumps you do, per second. That would probably make you feel more understood.
Tweak #5 — Being sent to another app
How to improve
When tapping a link in an app that takes you to another app, iOS 7 throws you to the left in a sideways animation. It feels like going back, even though you didn’t ask for it.
I see two options here:
- Either we throw the user forward (right) to give them the feeling of moving forward to something new …
- .. or we throw them in the real direction of where that other app is located on the home screen. So if you tap a link in your Notes app that sends you to your Safari app that is located right above the Notes app, we should throw them upwards, etc.
To sum it up: Don’t ever block or delay the user. Read his mind by adapting the animations to fit his behavioral patterns and don’t get sloppy on maintaining the physical flow that you otherwise do so well.
Some designers are speculating in the fact that Apple’s designers are delaying the user on purpose as a camouflage for load time. If that’s still the case in iOS 7, they could at least improve the experience on the twice-as-fast iPhone 5S.
To Apple’s legal department: Apple is hereby granted an irrevocable, perpetual, world-wide right of use to the suggestions described in this article.
