How to Use Animation to Improve your Brand

We like to wiggle, wiggle for sure, but how do you know when it's too much movement (aka animation)?

Using animation to enhance user experience is a clever tactic, but functional design implies that it should be precisely that – functional. By ensuring your animation is logical, informative, and purposeful, you can use animation to further brand awareness, assist with user experience, and, importantly, support your brand’s narrative.

Many designers will use animation to reduce cognitive load. Cognitive load is your working memory's effort to process information consciously. Our brains are wired to sense movement for protective purposes, but in an overly saturated digital landscape, sometimes mo' movement can mean mo' problems.

Here's How Animation Can Improve Your Brand:

Inform Orientation:?When a user jumps from section to section on a page,?anchors?help show them where they are in relation to where they once were. Animation can help ease users through sections of a website. The movement should not feel jarring. Applications like Instagram allow users to swipe back and forth between pages as new content loads, but the movement makes it easy to inform the user that they have shifted their location on the page.

Provide Instant Feedback:?If a user needs to press a button to confirm, like, or buy, for example, movement can signal whether or not the action was accepted or denied. It's a fun way to get people to click! Animation can help?drive attention?to specific places on a page and?promote?your call to action.

Furthermore, animation and focus can work together to showcase when an action has happened based on a user's touch.

In the following video, you will see how we applied animation to our client project with INTURN, an inventory management platform.

Live Updates:?Animation can help?smooth transitions?as content is added. Suppose you have live updates or a news feed with continuously added images. In that case, animations are a reliable way to showcase that things are changing without driving the viewer crazy with entire pages reloading.

Errors Become Less Scary:?Errors, whether technical or user, are bound to occur. But, when they do, a little animation goes a long way to provide?immediate relief?to what otherwise could feel like a frustrating situation. For example, a simple shake when a line item on a form is forgotten easily indicates to the user a problem has occurred but adds an informative level of understanding on what the solution could be (filling out the line item).

Here's a solid rule of thumb:?if you are navigating a website with a lot of animation and you find yourself flustered about where to go next, there is too much animation. As a component of design, animation should not be thrown in at the last minute, nor should it overcrowd the experience from the get-go. It should?inform the functionality.

From childhood, you know that animation is eye-catching and fun. But animation is more than lighthearted and playful by nature. It is a tool that can?transform?your user's experiences when appropriately implemented. The fine line between too much (crazy) and too little (boring) is one that you need to consider at every step of your brand's journey. If you’re ever unsure,?shoot us a note?– we have people who can help you get to movin’.