Animations are fun to watch the first time. The second time not so much. The third time they become annoying: we have a stacked graph that has an animation that takes about three seconds to complete. Way too long.

How can we reduce the waiting time?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Anyone out there with WebFOCUS 8 ?

I guess this is part of the new stuff.

At this stage if no one replies, put a case in with Techsupport.

Animations should be off by default even. What's the point of making users wait for their information?

I suspect that the only people who are interested in animations are those who do presentations about WF8.

If you have used InfoAssist to turn on animations, you can find a JSON object in your FEX:

*GRAPH_JS
"introAnimation": {
"enabled": true
},

To reduce the duration of an animation change it to something like

*GRAPH_JS
"introAnimation": {
"enabled": true,
"duration": 300
},

300 milliseconds is a nice, moderate compromise.

Wep,

where as I do agree with you on animations being a waste of time... There is something to be said about the user experience. Animations add to that user experience and can sometimes be the difference between adoption and failure. I think Marc's solution of minimizing the animation to palatable length is a good solution for getting your user to their information quickly while still providing the razzle dazzle that end users enjoy.

This is a slight diversion from the original "technical" topic ... but ...

Like Wep, I too am always challenging the real value of animation, but ultimately I realise I need to share Eric's view.

The keynote speaker at Summit was quite a "cool dude" and showed some very interesting visual representations of data.

He discussed a point that stuck in my mind though.

He called it the OOH/AAH principle - which is how we should measure any form of visualisation of data.

Your first reaction should always be OOH - a positive OOH obviously i.e. you see something that is visually appealing / you see something that catches your attention.

Then your second reaction should be AAH - when you understand what it is that the visualisation is representing.

A good rule of thumb though? And as developers we need to evaluate what we create from the perspective of the "end user".

So if animation will appeal to the end user, then it should be there!

But remember - a pig with lipstick is still a pig!

I believe there are a couple of settings for animation so you can control the timing as well as only do it once. Like it was said above, the first time is cool, but after that it is just annoying. There is now a setting so the animation only happens once. Not totally sure which release that is surfaced in; possibly production, maybe the next.

quote:

What's the point of making users wait for their information?

Many have said that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". And so it is with animation as well. Perhaps there should be a user selectable control which allows THE USER to select animation of not and is merely defaulted to whatever the developer , or specifications, dictate. ~ imho ~