#interaction design tools

Pull up a chair & get your butt cheeks comfortable, because this will be a comprehensive mind explosion.

Animation is really, bloody hard. Furthermore, the idea of using animation in the context of interactive design is really new for manyseasoned designers. As I see more people warm up to the concept ofTransitional Interfaces, I get excited, but equally frustrated. The tools are still not good enough.

My background in animation gives me the advantage of software tool knowledge, which I’ve learned to transpose over to interface thinking… but most designers don’t come from this background. As a result, it’s harder for designers to explore the fundamentals of animation. Their animation looks malnourished standing next to their outstanding static design efforts. Designers end up using wonky tools, sucking them into making generic, stiff, & mushy spring-physics driven garbage (yuck!). At the other end of the spectrum, the tools built for traditional animators are complicated power-tools for a different scope of problems, with an unfriendly learning curve.