A #1 -
BE CONCISE - HURRY/RUSH/GET TO THE POINT
Ensure Brevity to Safeguard Against User Disengagement & Alienation (don't make the animation too long) print
BE CONCISE - HURRY/RUSH/GET TO THE POINT
Ensure Brevity to Safeguard Against User Disengagement & Alienation (don't make the animation too long) print
The notion that it's human nature to be impatient isn't an opinion - it's fact. Since time immemorial, it has been the case that people watching, listening to, or interacting with something, won't stick around for long. But it gets worse.
Once you add modern lifestyles & technology to the mix, well... You better get right to the point - and that's pronto. I can think of few cases where this is more true than UI/UX design, and - more specifically - animation.
When putting together an animation - even an in-app infographic - you aren't even afforded the luxury of working with a brief timespan of seconds - you're working with microseconds.
You know that character you were planning to slide into view from off-screen over 1 second? Cut it down to 500 milliseconds.
Remember the way you envisioned them boisterously waving their arms at the user over 600 milliseconds? Slice it to a grand total of 300 milliseconds.
Yes, you might be compromising the visual potential of the work itself. But you've got to remember - there's no inherent value to the creation you've spawned. Instead, what constitutes appropriate duration hinges completely on the venue wherein the animation is to be included.
If you're designing an animatic for a film, oral presentation, or the like, it might be a good idea to make your animation span 2 seconds - heck, you might even have 5 or 10 seconds to work with.
But if the animatic is serving the purpose of spicing up the act of transitioning between screens or denoting the user on the successful completion of a app-related task, you need to be real with yourself.
Albeit your animatic may be both eye-catching and entertaining the first time the user's seen it, what about the tenth or hundredth time it hits them? Exactly - the charm has worn off.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course.
If the animation appears on a loading screen that genuinely requires several seconds to complete a complex back-end operation (probably few and far between) a drawn out animatic is fair game. As a matter of fact, it may even be preferable. After all, we don't want the user staring into the empty abyss, now do we?
Again, the point here is not to point fingers at poorly purposed animation. Rather, it's simply an appeal to common sense.
For an animation to qualify as truly great, it can't just be appealing to look at - it needs to fit into the user experience in which it is used.