How Animation Affects Perception

Everyone is familiar with the four tastes: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. The fifth taste, umami, is a bit mysterious and unexplained. It is that vibrant note found in parmesan, anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes, fish sauce, and Japanese dashi broth. While some may find umami too intense, when used correctly, it enhances and underscores all other flavors.

The same can be said for animations: they enhance and enrich the user experience. Year after year, animation and movement seep into interfaces, making them more understandable and natural. Be it the blinking 'I' cursor in text editors or the slight shake when entering an incorrect password—as if someone is shaking their head—movement in the interface is a crucial bridge between the real and virtual worlds. If you think about it, movement has always been an integral part of any story: in movies, games, and even software. However, in interface design, movement—particularly animation—is only beginning to come into its own.

The greatest value that animation brings to the interface is context. Animation turns static elements into a sequence of different states. Observing the transition from state to state, we understand the context of what is happening, making the interface more intuitive, rich, and recognizable.

Rediscovering Animation

Animation as we know it today has been shaped by several factors. Commercial tools like Flash sparked a wave of wild animation experiments. Over time, they were pushed aside by new technologies like CSS animations, which became available without any plugins. And, of course, nothing influenced the evolution of animation in the interface as much as the release of the iPhone.

The iPhone set the bar incredibly high: the virtual world became almost tangible. We no longer clicked on interface elements from afar with a cursor—we touched them. Unlocking the iPhone felt like opening a real lock; the shimmering text on the lock drew attention and hinted at the direction of movement.

Movement Conveys Change and Context

We are programmed to notice movement and draw conclusions. Simply flipping through a sequence of frames before our eyes, we already form these frames into a story. This property of the human brain opened the door to the world of cinema, television, and other forms of mixed reality. While movies and games used movement to tell incredible stories, digital products stood modestly on the sidelines. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that conscious, consistent application of animation in the interface can make digital products a natural extension of the human brain.

Movement Captures Attention

In the web, we often encounter user agreements, registration forms, and other similar text and dialog interfaces that we instinctively skip or close. We must understand that users of our digital products also ignore large chunks of them.

From an evolutionary standpoint, movement always attracts attention. Therefore, an animated element will receive more attention than a static one. For example, in games, no one explains the rules with text: animation immerses the player in the fictional world and helps explain its laws. Animation not only creates atmosphere but also easily conveys nuances and context that are difficult to explain with words.

Consider a podcast app. When you download an episode, a bouncing icon likely appears, indicating that the episode is downloaded and ready to listen to. Animation shows the result but doesn't give hints on where exactly the episode is downloaded. Slightly modifying the animation can solve this problem: for instance, let the episode icon bounce into the desired folder.

Movement Conveys Emotions

Animation not only helps to complete the context and navigate the product. Animation is a universal language that allows you to convey emotions, evoke feelings, and explain complex concepts. We can give animation a certain emotional color to set the users on the desired mood—excited or calm, sharp or playful.

Applications like Tinder use fun, playful animations, while digital synthesizers (e.g., AudioKit Synth One) prefer fast and precise animation effects. Facebook suddenly realized that animations give emotional actions (e.g., liking a photo) a very vivid charge. Animations, both bright and subtle, are indispensable for creating a memorable product image and building brand trust.

Movement Invites Exploration

Vivid, expressive animations in the interface uplift users' moods and instill the courage to explore hidden features of the product. Take, for example, the ubiquitous "pull to refresh" pattern. Swiping or pulling down, we always find something new—and the brain remembers this pattern.

Movement Brings Digital Products to Life

Movement is a powerful thing. It is an integral part of our physical world and a necessary ingredient of great design—though we often underestimate its importance. Movement unites disparate parts of the design into a cohesive whole and removes barriers between thinking and the interface.

Although animation is a relatively new thing in digital product design, it is essential if we want software to become a natural extension of our brain. Whether you work alone or in a team, study the design principles that help make the complex simple.

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