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Animation: Enhancing User Experience (UX) with the basic principles

Wikipedia defines Animation as the process of making the illusion of motion and change by means of the rapid display of a sequence of static images that minimally differ from each other.

Illusion???

Human beings are illusionist creatures. Anything that appears to be appealing to the eyes attracts people. They love visualizing virtual motion, and animation is all about creating this visual magic.

At Dynamic Experts Solutions, my team of web designers love to explore all possible exponents of animation to generate a great user interface. We believe this helps in enabling and speeding up the process of interaction.

My explanation for animation is simple as I believe it is the process of breathing life across the non-living objects with an active soul that is capable of sparking an interaction. When we think of animation, “motion” is the word that strikes the mind. How about anything that moves in virtual space. Lovely!!!

This game of motion didn’t start today or yesterday. But, it already existed since the day human beings started discovering and utilizing the gifts of nature in a quest to find what else is in place that we can utilize for making our lives more pleasant. Archeological findings that depict cave carvings and rock paintings extend back in time when there was no technology in place. But with technology and its development we realized a great deal can be done.

The people or things in motion that you can find  in these paintings and carvings is the evidence of how human beings are closely related to the aesthetic beauty of motion. This brings us to our topic of discussion. Here, I have summed up a brief on how designers develop designs using animation.

Let us begin with functional animation:

From a designer’s perspective, we could simply put it as the thing that we include in a user interface design to meet the demands of the process.

This principle works because people are easily drawn to anything that is visually enthralling, which means animation is the only essential tool that you can use to attract your people.

What was the driving force?

The impact of mobile phones and the growing influence of these on the lives of people is one of the reasons that made designers think of animation as the most important aspect of the design process. Animations help to brighten up a product while making it simple, clear and user-specific ultimately ensuring a better user experience.

It serves a logical purpose.

Logic? I know Logic is not the key word for a designer, as we are creative people, but if we implement an animation that is part of a logical process, then we are possibly using a valid functional animation and this is how I justify the use of animation in designs.

I would rather view animation as a tool that fits into user needs.

Let me take you across the types of interface animations, which forms the focus of our discussion:

• Decorative Animation
• Animations defining microinteractions
• Flowchart Animations
• Explanatory Animations

I. Decorative Animations

I don’t have to explain too deep about what is meant by decorative animations. The word “decorative” says it all. The main purpose of decorative animations is to attract people. This intends to develop user interface designs that are original and appealing to the eyes. It gives life to the interfaces as well as presents it in a more interesting form to the viewer though it will not contain any important features to give spark to an interaction process.