Elevating Web UI with Animation and Motion Graphics Techniques

One of the most crucial aspects of a design is capturing the user’s attention or drawing their attention to a particular component of the design. Animations and Motion Graphics are the go-to things for designers to capture the visitor’s attention.

In this article, we will discuss animations and motion graphics. What animations are, what are the fundamentals of Animation, what are motion graphics, their importance, and best practices that you must follow?

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.

What is Motion Graphics?

Motion Graphics as the definition says is the movement of Graphics in a design is called motion graphics. Motion Graphics sounds very similar to animation with the only difference being that motion graphics is about giving movement to static images while animation is about giving movement to a series of images. You can consider Motion Graphics to be the subset of Animations.

Examples of Motion Graphic techniques are:

1. Glowing Text
2. Moving Text
3. Video Transitions
4. Carousels
5. Liquid motion

Fundamentals of Animation and Motion Graphics

There are three main fundamentals of Animation and Motion Graphics 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 and Motion Graphics 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 and Motion Graphics Techniques

• 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 and motion graphics 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 and your motion graphics have the right speed and duration. The duration of the animation should not be too less or too long.
• Consistency: The animations and motion graphics of a website in Desktop view must be consistent to the animations and motion graphics 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 and motion graphics 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 animations, motion graphics and the overall design we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Conclusion

Animations and Motion Graphics are a double edged sword, on one hand they make the UI a lot better than before but on the other hand the kind of slows the website. Animations and Motion Graphics are one of the best ways to highlight certain texts, grab user’s attention and enhance the overall look of the web application.

Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing animations or motion graphics for your next application or website.