Brian,
Thank you for your comment. There are ongoing discussions between engineering and product management on just this topic ... a balance of eye-candy or real work. If the tool were designed wholly to optimize time on task for a technical worker, your argument against animations is weighty. Additionally, there is an engineering resource and scale burden to animation (CPU, memory, IO, developer skills) that increases our own service lifecycle costs. There are also performance hits on the portal and its back-end server and the client browser you use.... click-to-response time increases with animation and browser platform becomes more sluggish. It will be helpful if you can provide a top-level estimate as to the degree of "wastefulness" (% time "wasted") in performance of your tasks due to animation. This can be most effectively measured/estimated in terms of "time" and time can be translated to "I get home X minutes later and cannot play with my kids as long", or "For my allotted time on task during the day, the % or customers I cannot serve is 25% due to animation delays," or my response to a customer crisis is 50% longer when I have to deal with animation delays for specific tasks."
Some participants have suggested that elements of animation will IMPROVE their bottom line... notably when elements of the portal are used for presentation to customers in either pre-sale or post-sale activity. Eye-candy can be positively used to make a sales point, where pure html might not.
Appreciate yours and others opinions on a) where animation helps, b) where animation hinders, c) whether widgets to enable/disable animation at certain pages in the portal UI would be helpful - to optimize performance when time on task is critical and to optimize performance when briefing your customers with a realtime view is important. Statically created reports can make a case, but animations may lead the creative juices in your customer fuurther towards a "deal".
Comments and opinions appreciated.
Dave
