Design systems, systems thinking, and the "curse of the gifted"

A friend of mine calls it "the curse of the gifted" -- a tendency to lean on your native ability too much, because you've always been rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.

You are a brilliant implementor, more able than me and possibly (I say this after consideration, and in all seriousness) the best one in the Unix tradition since Ken Thompson himself.  As a consequence, you suffer the curse of the gifted programmer -- you lean on your ability so much that you've never learned to value certain kinds of coding self-discipline and design craftsmanship that lesser mortals *must* develop in order to handle the kind of problem complexity you eat for breakfast.

But you make some of your more senior colleagues nervous.  See, we've seen the curse of the gifted before.  Some of us were those kids in college.  We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due -- the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your native talent alone doesn't cut it any more.  The smarter you are, the longer it takes to hit that crunch point -- and the harder the adjustment when you finally do.  And we can see that *you*, poor damn genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising.

As Linux grows, there will come a time when your raw talent is not enough.  What happens then will depend on how much discipline about coding and release practices and fastidiousness about clean design you developed *before* you needed it, back when your talent was sufficient to let you get away without.

http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3

How Linus Torvalds works (as written in this post) is how I cook. ;) I don't measure, I eyeball everything. I do things until they "look right" and then I stop.

I would never ever ever do that fast, loose, play-it-by-eye-and-natural-talent with a design system, because I have learned that it just doesn't scale. In fact, I design... design systems specifically to avoid or mitigate the "curse of the gifted".

At the end of the day, a design system that isn't easy enough to use by all involved in the SDLC, so much so that it becomes the default pit of success that teams fall into together... is a failed design system. Or one that is currently failing, at any rate. Failures can be remedied, so there is that.

I see a disturbing tendency to approach design systems (especially for enterprise) with far too much reliance on 'the curse of the gifted'. This is especially evident when every piece of a design system is designed on an ad-hoc basis, with no regard to how it fits into everything else. If the designer's eye is good enough, they can skate by on the curse of the gifted - until they cannot, anymore. And their teams? God help their teams. 

When it comes to design systems - I want the opposite of skating by on talent. I want to help build design systems that enable delivery teams to fall into the pit of success together. The kinds of systems that improve collaboration for everyone, because of a clear, shared understanding of what it is we want to do, and what we have on hand to do it. Design systems where the default is usually the right choice, where guesswork is kept to a minimum... and yet where necessary changes can be made on the fly with the minimum of cost, or drama. And while I'm describing my ideal pony, I want to be able to stay and see such a system grow and evolve over time.

Right now, I'm still looking for that pony. Maybe I'll get lucky. ;)

Things to consider when defining default animation timings and easings for user interfaces

I meant to rewrite this nicely a long time ago, never got down to re-writing it. And yet... it seems like it could help people. So here's the original braindump version.



Default timing for animations == 200ms. Default easing == Ease In-Out

This is the simplest way to achieve what we want, in terms of animation.

What we are doing here can be considered "semantic" animation, as it is the animations that "explain" to the user why and how the map is being displayed to them. The equivalent is a book opening, or a page turning.

If possible, make the timings and the animation types customisable, with defaults.


Why 200ms?
Because when it comes to things we interact with mostly visually, 200ms is the amount of time it takes the human brain to register that something has come into view, or changed. At 200ms, UI animation feels almost instant.

Now, we could get pickier, and make it 300-400ms for XS, SM, and 200ms for MD, L, XL, because the distance travelled by the animated objects also influences how fast they feel. However, this lies in the realm of "fancy extras". They are nice, but if we start doing that, then to be consistent, we need to do it EVERYWHERE.

So 200ms. ;) For everything.

Please note that this is a visual thing. If you are writing with a stylus, and the lag is 200ms (or you're gaming! ;) ) 200ms, is way way way too slow. When writing with a digital stylus, or drawing with a mouse, the latency has to be as close to 0 as possible. Even 100ms feels laggy when you draw with a stylus or a mouse.


Why Ease In-Out?
Easing makes animations look more natural, by visually mimicking the laws of physics.

We're using Ease In-Out as the default, as it mimics physics, AND is less confusing for most people who aren't professional animators.

But whyyyyy! ;) Ok here's why...

If we wanted to be picky, when something animates INTO view, we should use Ease-Out. Ease-Out is when something moves fast at first, and then slows down. This mimics physics in the real world, where stuff loses momentum as it moves, due to friction. So it starts fast (because as it's animating into our view, it's already moving), and as it runs out of energy, it slows down.

Likewise, when something animates OUT OF view, we should use Ease-In. Ease-In is when something moves slowly at first, and then speeds up. Again, this mimics physics in the real world, where it takes time for stuff to build up momentum, and then it goes faster as it collects enough energy to overcome friction. So it starts slow (because it's charging up, while still being in our view), and then the animation speeds up as the item leaves our view.

^And yes, for stuff that comes INTO view, it's better to use Ease-OUT, for stuff that LEAVES our view, it's better to use Ease-IN. Yes. It's horribly confusing.

Ease In-Out to the rescue! ;) Our :X compromised best of both worlds. It's not really... but it's the least confusing to remember.

Ease In-Out is when something moves slowly at first, gets quicker... then slows back down. In UI terms, this is a nice compromise if we don't wanna be fancy, because as humans, we're lazy about how we perceive things.

When we use Ease In-Out for something that animates INTO view, the human-goldfish mind has most likely already stopped paying attention before the last "slow" in the slow-fast-slow sequence. So to the human-goldfish, most of the time it'll look like an Ease-Out.

When we use Ease-In-Out for something that animates OUT of view, the human-goldfish mind (you see where this is going) takes a while to notice what's going on. ;) So it likely doesn't notice the first "slow" in the slow-fast-slow sequence.*

*Updated on 28 Jan 2022 to change ease in-out to accurately reflect a slow-fast-slow sequence. I got sequence of what happens with ease in-out wrong originally, but using it still works, because the human-goldfish principle still applies.

Some samples, using 200ms and (naughty naughty, ALL ease-in).
Each click as shown is triggering a new 200ms animation to the next keyframe.