Frequency and novelty
“As a designer, I love to animate everything,” Rauno Freiberg writes in Invisible Details of Interaction Design. Object permanence, creating a focal point, and delight are all good reasons to do it. What is not obvious, he says, is when not to. His first clue is the input. There is an inherent disconnect between peripheral devices and the screen: pressing a key feels less visceral and more mechanical than touching glass, so mouse and keyboard interactions can often go unanimated without feeling jarring.
His case in point is the command menu, the pattern Maggie Appleton catalogues as the Command K bar: a bar that pops up in the middle of the screen on a keyboard shortcut, traditionally Command K, which lets you find and run an action in a few keystrokes without taking your hands off the keyboard. It is tempting to throw an opacity and scale fade on the overlay. But consider, Rauno says, an interaction frequency of hundreds of times a day. After the hundredth viewing the same animation starts to feel like cognitive burden. When an action is that common its novelty is diminished too; it does not feel like you are doing anything peculiar that deserves a flourish. This is the idea he later names frequency and novelty.
He tested it on himself. Building a bookmarking tool, bmrks.com, he felt great about animating the active indicator and the items being added to and removed from the list. After a couple of days they began to feel sluggish. He made the motion snappier and it still felt as though he was waiting too long when working from the keyboard. He removed motion from the core interactions and, in his words, “suddenly felt like I was moving much faster.”
macOS agrees. Context menus appear without motion; used thousands of times a day, with very low novelty and high frequency, they feel right unanimated despite being a mouse interaction. What Rauno noticed on closer inspection is that the menu does fade out, subtly, and that the selected item briefly blinks the accent colour to confirm the selection registered. His reading is that the fade makes the exit feel more graceful and intentional than abruptly vanishing after the blink. The App Switcher is the same: the overlay never animates, which keeps moving between apps snappy, and if the time between pressing Command and Tab is short enough the previous window receives focus immediately without the menu appearing at all.
Emil Kowalski reaches the same rule from his own tooling. In You Don’t Need Animations he writes that he uses Raycast hundreds of times a day, that it has no animation at all, and that this is the optimal experience: he has a clear goal and does not need to be delighted. Hover effects used many times a day likely benefit most from no animation. For keyboard-initiated actions his phrasing is absolute: “You should never animate them.” In 7 Practical Animation Tips he puts a range on it, advising you to remove animations or hover interactions seen “tens, maybe even hundreds of times a day.” Two designers, working from different tools, arrive at the same conclusion.
In February 2026 Rauno picked the thread back up in Novelty. He connects the 2023 hypothesis to semantic satiation, the phenomenon in which repeating a word causes it to temporarily lose meaning, and argues the same thing happens with extravagant animation in common use cases. Novelty, he writes, “is the equivalent of an exclamation mark. Akin to seasoning, you don’t want too much of it.” Users will not think about how much of it an interface has, but they will feel the answer. He borrows a frame from cinematography: the three colour rule, where about 60% of the frame is a primary colour, about 30% a secondary, and the remaining 10% an accent that lifts the subject out of its background. For software he proposes the same shape: make 90% of the experience familiar and 10% novel. He also asks that the essay be read with a grain of salt; these are observations, not prescriptions.
Where should the 10% go? Onboarding, because you generally only onboard once. His own product, Devouring Details, plays a transition from login to welcome that can only be experienced right after logging in; reload the page and it appears instantly, without motion. He does not need to be greeted “welcome” on every return, and forgetting the moment means you can be pleasantly surprised by it later. The implementation is a cookie set client-side on login and a Next.js rewrite that serves an animated version of the index page, then clears the cookie. Paco Coursey’s site follows the same strategy: a staggered animation on first load that does not replay when you navigate away and back. And the iOS Home Screen, the likely first point of contact after setting up a device, staggers its app icons into place after you unlock, but not when you return to it already unlocked. In Designing Depth Rauno calls that staggering and says it makes a primitive swipe feel three-dimensional and satisfying.
The second half of the essay is about novelty as contrast. Novelty is the contrast to sameness, and it works best as contrast; otherwise it overwhelms. A dramatic route transition he would not want on every page works for a microsite of interviews precisely because the sibling pages are static. Stripe Press is intentionally more experimental than the rest of Stripe’s pages, and “the novelty hits hard because most of the pages aren’t such experiences.” Then he adds a variable: intent. How much novelty is the person willing to accept? Someone playing a game is there to be entertained and is receptive to it. The cautionary case is Arc. The Browser Company, in his telling, built Arc into a saxophone and found it hard to turn into a piano anyone could play. Their own name for the reason is the novelty tax: tabs over here, things called Spaces, Pin Tabs that are different from Bookmarks, and people could not handle how much there was to learn that was new. How much novelty you can get away with depends on your ambition and your audience. Not Boring found a group of people who value beauty, uniqueness, and game-feel, and builds novel versions of non-novel functions like photos, habits, timers, and calculators for them. Such audiences, Rauno notes, tend to be smaller and more passionate.
His takeaway, and this section’s: “Make most things familiar, do something unexpected.” In practice that means two passes over any interface. First, find the actions performed hundreds of times a day, especially the keyboard ones, and remove their motion; if something still needs to acknowledge the action, a subtle exit or a brief state change is enough. Second, find the moments that happen once, like onboarding or a first load, and spend the novelty there. The taste-level question of how contrast works across a whole product is picked up in Novelty and contrast, in the Taste chapter.