Animation can enhance the user experience of your web design by adding visual feedback, creating transitions, and conveying personality. However, not every animation is suitable for every UI element. How can you choose the right animation for UI elements that matches your design goals and user expectations? Here are some tips to help you make the best decisions.
Before you add animation to your UI elements, it's important to consider the purpose of the animation in your design. Animation can be used to attract attention to important or new information, guide users through a navigation or workflow, provide feedback or confirmation for user actions, enhance the aesthetics or branding of your design, or create a sense of continuity between screens or elements. Depending on its purpose, you should select the appropriate type, duration, timing, and easing of animation that supports your design intention and user needs.
First of all, Do not slow down and spoil the user experience just for the sake of having animation in your websites. Purpose of Animation: It should serve a functional purpose like guiding attention, indicating status, showing system feedback, or explaining changes in the layout. Keep it Simple: Animations should be subtle and not overpower the content or functionality of the UI. Overly complex or lengthy animations can be distracting and annoying for users. Speed and Duration: The speed and duration of animations should be fast enough to not slow down the user experience, but slow enough to be noticed and understood. Typically, animations should last between 200 and 500 milliseconds.
The first mistake I see most often is websites having the same animation for every element, usually elements sliding in, which is super distracting - that's not to say never do it, but use it when it makes sense. The second is having generic animations that are based on the developer's style, rather than the feeling of the website. Every website is unique, and the animations should contribute to the brand identity, rather than make it feel like a general website.
A well-applied animation can accompany a satisfactory user experience and a bad animation can cause confusion and even annoyance. For example, imagine a checkout process where when you go from one screen to the next you move forward to the same side as when you go back, confusing right? Therefore, you must be clear about the idea you want to achieve with your animation. Think about the context. An important section, keep the animations simple. Animation should be a complement. A current standard says that an interaction animation should last 5 seconds or less. That's a reasonable time for the user to process the information and the animation doesn't become a problem.
Animation is not just about moving things around, but also creating a realistic and natural motion that follows certain principles. These principles are based on traditional animation techniques, such as anticipation, ease in and ease out, squash and stretch, follow through and overlapping action, and secondary action. By applying these principles to UI design, you can create dynamic and expressive elements that communicate your design message and emotion. For example, anticipation prepares the user for an action or change by creating a small movement before the main one. Ease in and ease out helps to start and end the animation with a slow speed and accelerate or decelerate in between to create a smooth motion. Squash and stretch alters the shape of the object to emphasize its speed, direction, and impact. Follow through and overlapping action continues the movement of the object after the main action to show its inertia and weight. Lastly, secondary action adds a subtle movement to the object or its parts to enhance its character and realism.
I know this is advice found often, but using the 12 principles of animation created by Disney is really a great set of rules to base your animations off of. The important thing is to add your own style to your animations. Sure you'll get inspiration and do a lot of copying at first, but overtime you'll find your own unique style.
If you're not confident or experienced in creating your own animations, animation libraries or tools can be a great help. Animate.css is a CSS library that provides various animation effects for web elements, while Lottie allows you to use animations created in Adobe After Effects as JSON files. Framer Motion is a React library that simplifies the creation and manipulation of animations for web components. These libraries or tools can save you time and effort, as well as ensure consistency and quality of your animations. Furthermore, they offer a range of options and parameters that suit your design needs and preferences, helping you choose the right animation for UI elements.
Frameworks are great for beginners and advanced users. CSS animations are really a nice entry level to website animations, and they're pretty easy to learn. Once you get more experienced and want better animations, GSAP by Green Sock is probably one of the coolest animation frameworks at the moment, it's super lightweight and there's so many possibilities.
Finally, you should always test and refine your animations to ensure that they work well and enhance the user experience of your web design. UI prototyping tools, such as Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision Studio, can help you simulate the interaction and behavior of your UI elements with animation. Testing and refining your animations can provide feedback and insights on how the animations affect usability, accessibility, and satisfaction of your web design, allowing you to choose the right animation for UI elements.
Testing and refining is probably the most important stage of the animation process. It's easy to see complex animations and feel overwhelmed by the end result, but those animations took hours of building, testing and refining. Even the best creative developers don't get animations right the first time, so try different things like timing, delays, sequences, eases and eventually your animation will be something incredible.
With the rise of so many website builders like Webflow, Framer, Square etc, it's really easy to add in custom JavaScript animations with their built in tools. This is a good thing for sure, but the down side is that it becomes really easy to add animations when they're not needed. Animations should be strategically thought about and planned before implementing. It shouldn't be a case of sweeping through the website at the end and adding in a bunch of slide in animations on all elements which is seen pretty often these days.