Comment 3 for bug 1017510

@vanvugt; the idea behind the having a slower animation to start with and then increasing in speed during usage is to solve the tradeoff between "slow clear animation allows the user to see exactly what is happening, but makes the computer feel slow and is annoying with repeated usage" and "fast snappy animation makes the interface feel quick and gets out of the way of the user, but is not so descriptive".

Once a user has learnt that minimised windows live in the Launcher, the best animation is something super snappy, exactly like we have at the moment. We don't want this to change. However to solve the 'new user using Ubuntu for the first time ever' use case, an initial slower animation that gets slightly quicker everytime a window is minimised should do the trick. Yes this approach has the animation speed change over time without explaining this to the user, but at most the perceived effect will be the computer getting quicker, and in most cases won't be noticed because minimise animations are the type of thing that are not consciously watched after seeing them happen for the first few times. This way we are teaching the user about how Unity behaves, and then getting out of their way with the minimum of fuss.

This will also need to be tested, so it would be much appreciated if you could expose 'starting speed', 'speed decline duration in number of minimises' and 'ending speed' variables (as well as a 'reset' option for testing purposes), and then we can experiment with tuning these variables.

Thanks,
John