Animation is a tool for good. Don’t abuse it - form follows function

Animation is fast becoming an essential part of interface design, and it’s easy to see why. It gives us a whole new dimension to play with—time. This creates opportunities to make our interfaces better at every level: it can make them easier to understand, more pleasant to use, and nicer to look at.

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So far, so uncontroversial, right? Animation is a good thing—when done well, at least. But there’s one aspect of animation that nobody ever seems to talk about. Some animation, while technically well executed, makes interfaces more confusing instead of less.

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With today’s devices, everything can be animated—and increasingly everything is. The problem is that the design process hasn’t caught up to this change in technology. For the most part, interfaces are still conceived as separate, static screens and then linked together with relatively crude animations.

“You can’t treat individual screens as separate entities if the transitions between them are animated. To the user, the entire experience is one continuous space.“

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Animations are most useful when they reflect and reinforce the semantic relationships between elements: for example, “this comment belongs to this article,” or “these menu items are part of this menu.”

Think of every element of your interface as a single, self-sufficient component with a specific meaning, state, and position in space. Then make sure your animations reflect this. If a popover belongs to a button, it shouldn’t just fade in; it should emerge from that button. When opening an email, the full message should not just slide in from the side, but come from within the preview.

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