Apps that can stay still, that can show me one page at a time and then calmly go to the next or previous page, that’s relaxing. Discrete steps and cleary defined modes. That calms me down.
Apps that are all gradiated and fiddly and zoomy and jittery, that freaks me the heck out.
Some of us broken-hearted suckers in the 21th century need to juggle a lot of data. A fast screen can help with that. A fast screen can also hinder that, if it asks us to do the juggling on a rolling table on a moving train on a tilting pinball table.
This is why epub readers are better than browsers even on the most glaring LCD of all time: it show you one page at a time instead of scrolling a few sentences here and there. I don’t get why browsers even in our modern day still can’t do that, while epub readers all do it easily.
That was one of the big web disappointments for me when I first modemed up in 1995: that the “page down” experience was so unsatisfying, with having to reread last page’s last sentence as the next page’s first sentence instead of clearly defined pages.
I don’t wanna scroll scroll scroll, I want to turn between separate pages with no overlapping text; a UI design decision the printed book mastered centuries ago, thankfully or we’d still read our potboilers and smutty romance novels on scroll tubes.
Panning good when zoomed in, but zooming and panning should be a deliberate choice, not the whim of a misplaced palm.