The Benefits of Animated UI/UX GIFs

Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, Animated GIFs become a great way to communicate with the users delightfully. This is why Animated GIFs 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. How GIFs differ from other image formats is that they can include animations, these animations make the GIFs much more interesting.

In this article, we will discuss what Animated GIFs are. what are the fundamentals of Animated GIFs, what are the benefits of Animated GIFs in the design along with some best practices for designing them?

The Benefits of Animated UI/UX GIFs

Animated GIFs

Animated GIF often referred to as Animated Graphics Interchange Format is a format with images along with creative movement of text or visuals. Animated GIFs are used in designs to catch the user’s attention or bring the user’s attention to a particular component in the design. How GIFs differ from other image formats is that they can include animations, these animations make the GIFs much more interesting. Objects in real life don’t appear and disappear in an instant so these Animated GIFs make the design appear to be much more real rather than having images.

Benefits of Animated GIFs

• Catches User’s attention: For a better user retention, catching the visitor’s attention is crucial and using Animated GIFs are one of the best ways to catch visitor’s attention. Not only that but Animated GIFs 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: Animated GIFs 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, Animated GIFs makes it a bit simpler for the user to understand what’s happening by explaining them through moving visuals.
• Better Communication: The visual elements and text along with Animated GIFs 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 Animated GIFs and also 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. Animated GIFs can be used to visually explain and show the Unique Selling Proposition of the application or website.
• Effective and Enjoyable interaction: Design is the way through which users can interact with any web application. Animated GIFs are aimed at easy enjoyable and effective interactions between the users and the app. The primary goal of Animated GIFs is to provide the best interaction to the user.
• Adding short format video content: Sometimes, images are not enough to explain a concept to the user and we rather need videos for that. But adding videos to a web application can make it slower and less optimized. This is where Animated GIFs comes to the rescue, Animated GIFs can be user to show short format videos in the content without taking too much memory and making the website slower.

Best Practices

• Speed and Duration: The effectiveness of animations used in Animated GIFs 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 Animated GIFs of the web application for Desktop must be consistent to the Animated GIFs 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 the visuals used in the Animated GIFs 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 Animated GIFs are working and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the Animated GIFs 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, Animated GIFs have become a important weapon in a designer’s arsenal. Animated GIFs can draw user’s attention to a component, make the design understandable and a lot more. Animated GIFs has a lot of benefits but along with that it also is high on space and makes the web appliacation slower. Therefore, one must use Animated GIFs only when necessary. Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing animations for your next application or website.