Perceived responsiveness of the UI

Design
#1

Wanted to start a discussion about the feel of the UI while you tap/swipe/pull/interact with it in general.

It might be just me but SFOS in general feels a bit sluggish. Play with an apple or android device -no need for it to be hi-end-, come back to SFOS and the UI feels slower in a way. In some cases i can “identify” what makes it feel slow ie the way our apps start (cover then full window animation) but in many cases it seems to me that there is something odd going on. Like the UI doesn’t follow the users interaction speed (within reasonable limits of course).

I don’t want to rule out performance/optimization issues even thought i run SFOS in probably one of the fastest supported devices and there should be no problem with it running the OS.

So yeah. Your opinions, experience, feel etc. Discuss. :slightly_smiling_face:

5 Likes
Community meeting on IRC 3rd June 2021
#2

I think a large part of it can indeed be narrowed down to the opening animation. On Android and iOS, when you tap on an icon, it immediately opens something, even if it’s basically just a static screen with the application’s logo. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way Sailfish does it, but it does give off the idea that it’s slower, like on a desktop OS where you first get a spinning icon or progress bar until the application is loaded.

1 Like
#3

Just to be clear i don’t want to discuss only the app animation. It also feels sluggish to me when (ie) i swipe from the home screen to go to the notifications. And many other areas that i cant remember from the top of my head.

#4

I think sailfish uses a different input smoothing, so when you drag something, it first lags a bit. I think it is not a performance issue, but simply a different tradeoff of smoother movement vs lag.

#5

For me it doesn’t feel sluggish when I go any direction home–notifications–app grid–top menu. Neither on Xperia X nor on Jolla C. Only lock screen animation could be a little bit quicker.

Other question is app openning (and browser work speed, which migt depend on internet speed and of course depends on the browser itself), this tempts me consider upgrading to faster device even oficcially unsupported one (e.g. from Xperia Tama family). But I doubt it will be ressonable, migt be I will just replace the battery for Xperia X.

What is the fastest supported device?

#6

@apb for me this is also the case even on xa2 , sometimes it feels like it has frozen trying to sweep left or right. But also in later versions the lag/filtering in using pulleys started to annoy me greatly. Sometimes I have to redo a pylley selection 2-3 times, which never happened before the filter changes. The fastest device is my xz3 which is a speed daemon in most cases, but unoptimized filters is noticeable there too.

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#7

Another area that feels slow. Waking up the phone. You click the button (or double tap if you still use a J1) and the animation makes it feel slow.

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#8

I used to deal with animations and laginess of the UI with the Animation Settings patch…but AFAIK, it’s not working on the latest version of the SFOS which is a shame.

#9

I can also confirm that SFOS feels sluggish to me since the beginning on my XA2.
Especially the scrolling of lists and pages (Web browser, apps) seems to lag behind the touch input and/or the scrolled content is redrawn in an apparent and disruptive way (especially while scrolling with a low velocity/speed). The native gallery and settings apps are good examples for such sluggish scrolling.
Furthermore very often the touch input is not interpreted correctly and this is annoying as hell: Button tabs will be interpreted as swipe gestures, the pinch to zoom gesture will be interpreted as a tab/swipe and vertical and horizontal swipes are interchanged. But also just horizontally swiping back and forth in the home launcher will result in all possible swipe gestures (scrolling the eventsview, opening top menu and opening the app launcher). And the laggish keyboard input shall be not forgotten.
Another issue is that UI animations seem to have a higher priority than touch input, e.g
tapping on the home screen (the screen containing the app tiles) directly followed by a horizontal swipe will surpress the swipe gesture and first display the ui animation*.

Sometimes I am playing around with the Huawei device of my gf and I am astonished by the smooth UX (especially the scrolling), even though I do not like the walled garden OS and I am a long-time Maemo/MeeGo/SFOS user.

In summary: Jolla should put some effort in improving the whole user experience. :nerd_face:

Update:
*This issue has been fixed with Sailfish OS 3.4.0.xx. :slight_smile:

#10

To get a UX nonce on board you have to speak it terms they can empathise with.
Say you are striving for a Cinéma vérité feel with hard cut immediacy, rather than the languid soft core porn feel with animation.

1 Like
#11

One more thing that makes the UI feels a slow is the activation of the pulley menus. It should just move to the option you select and not flash to show what you selected. You cant cancel it at that point anyway. And going back is always a swipe away.

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#12

Does anyone know if there is a “speed” limit in the animation transitions from page to page (or from home to notifications etc)

And what is that??

#13

I don’t know how these work, but there is a patch on patchmanager web catalog to control speeds Animation settings. I haven’t used it myself, but maybe sources can give hint how to do it in case patch itself don’t work.

#14

Thanks. Since this is doable by a patch it means that is something it can be changed easily.

The current settings is something that makes SFOS feel slow. Jolla can tweak this.

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#15

I’ve used it before, and it was great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on SFOS 3.4. Somebody has to fix it or repack it for 3.4

#16

I updated the patch to work on 3.4.
https://coderus.openrepos.net/pm2/project/patch-animation-settings-iii

3 Likes
#17

Thank you so much. I hope it will also work on SFOS 4.0.1.48, because I am running that version at the moment.

#18

Thank you so much! The difference is huge, at least in my opinion. The feeling is for a completely different phone :grinning:
In my opinion, this should be part of the factory settings. Thanks again!

1 Like
#19

I updated the patch to work on 4.0.1.48.

3 Likes
#20

Amazing! Thank you very much.