Animations in Web Design

Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, it becomes necessary to use animation to communicate the value of our business/our client’s business delightfully. This is why animations have become the go-to thing for designers to capture the visitor’s attention or bring the visitor’s attention to a particular component in the design.

In this article, we will discuss what animations are. what are the fundamentals of Animation, what is the importance of Animation in the Web, and what best practices you must follow?

Animations in Web Design

What is Animation?

The creative movement of text or visuals in a web application to catch the user’s attention or bring the user’s attention to a particular component in the design is called animation.

Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, it becomes necessary to use animation to communicate the value of our business/our client’s business delightfully. Animations help our users to understand and properly digest what’s happening in the screen. Objects in real life don’t appear and disappear in an instant, so animations can help us bridge the gap between an active and inactive state.

Fundamentals of Animation

There are three main fundamentals of Animation in web design:

1. Meaning: Meaning of animation means making sure that we are choosing the right animations based on the character of your the business. For example, If we are designing a kid’s toy website, we should have some fun quirky animations to go along with the the theme of the website rather than dark and sophisticated animations.
2. Physics: Animation has its foundation in nature and real life. In order for our animations to feel natural they need to follow the physics of Real World objects. For example, if we are animating a slider, the best thing that we can do is to choose one direction for the movement and keep that direction for all of the elements.
3. Choreography: Choreography is a coordinated sequence of motion in a particular animation that helps in maintaining user’s focus as the interface adapts. Choreography helps us establish hierarchy in our animations. These are the three rules of creating choreography:
   1. Element that doesn’t move has the lowest hierarchy.
   2. Element that animates first is secondary.
   3. Element that animates last is tertiary.

Importance of Animation in Web design

• Catching User’s attention: For a better user retention, catching the visitor’s attention is crucial and animations are one of the best ways to catch visitor’s attention. Not only that but animations helps in directing the user’s attention to a particular component that we as designers wants the visitors to have a look at.
• Making the design more understandable: Animations helps our users to understand and properly digest what’s happening in the screen. Sometimes it becomes tough for user’s to understand what’s going on in the screen when too much information is being passed to the user. At these times, animations makes it a bit simpler by telling the user where to focus and which part of information is not that important.
• Better Communication: The visual elements and text along with animations takes the major part of communication in web applications. Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy product/service or know about it. Here good copywriting along with animations can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.
• Hierarchy and Organization: When designing web applications, one thing that we must take care of is the fact that every application has a Unique Selling Proposition. And the design must have a clear hierarchy where that Unique Selling Proposition is highlighted. Animations can create a hierarchy between texts as well as visuals in order to highlight the website’s Unique Selling Proposition.
• Effective and Enjoyable interaction: Design is the way through which users can interact with any web application. Animations are aimed at easy enjoyable and effective interactions between the users and the app. The primary goal of animations is to provide the best interaction to the user.

Best Practices

• Speed and Duration: The effectiveness of animations depends on this crucial aspect. Too fast animation might not be noticed properly by the viewer and too slow animation who not serve it’s purpose of drawing the viewer’s attention. Make sure that your animation has the right speed and duration. The duration of the animation should not be too less or too long.
• Consistency: The animations of the web application for Desktop must be consistent to the animations we have on other devices with smaller screens. This provides a better experience and a factor of relatability which user switches from one device to another.
• Natural Animations: By default anything that is unnatural to our eyes looks odd to us. Make sure that the animations that you are designing are natural and are in accordance with the laws of physics.
• User feedback and iterating: Taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about how the animation is and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the animation and the overall design we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Conclusion

Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, Animations become a important weapon in a designer’s arsenal. Animations can help you create hierarchy, draw user’s attention to a component, make the design understandable and a lot more. Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing animations for your next application or website.