With today’s devices, everything can be animated-and increasingly everything is. Only now are we starting to get to a point where computing resources aren’t holding interfaces back anymore. It was still mostly pressed into service for small things, though, and rarely influenced the overall structure of interfaces. Example of a remarkably fluid animation in an early version of Mac OS.Īs computers got increasingly powerful, animation started to be used more frequently for things like maximizing windows or opening new tabs. Every state change was a hard cut.Īlthough there are some notable early examples of good interface animation that date all the way back to the original Macintosh (PDF), because of the limited graphical capabilities of computers back then, effective animation was the exception rather than the rule. Since their inception in the 1970s, graphical user interfaces were basically a series of static screens (PDF) linked together without any transitions. How did we get here? Let’s take a step back and quickly review the history leading up to this point. The problem isn’t with any of the individual transitions, but with the fact that the animations contradict each other. It’s only when they all try to play together as parts of a single experience that things get confusing. These animations might make sense if you designed the individual screens in a vacuum. The two zooming animations have completely different effects in this case. The two animations give us conflicting information about where the homescreen and the apps are located in space. The app is both inside its icon on the homescreen and next to the homescreen. Why is the icon above the app now? Where are all the other icons? And why does another homescreen appear next to the apps? We should get back to the icons around the app on the homescreen, but instead we see a stack of other apps. They’re still in their initial positions, laid out in a grid around the open app. When we tap the Overcast app icon on the homescreen, the icon zooms and morphs into the app. Some animation, while technically well executed, makes interfaces more confusing instead of less. But there’s one aspect of animation that nobody ever seems to talk about. So far, so uncontroversial, right? Animation is a good thing- when done well, at least. Sometimes all of these factors converge: when you minimize a window, would you be able to tell where it goes without the animation? How much longer would it take you to find the minimized window in the dock? Hard cuts make it difficult to understand state changes, because changing the entire page means you have to rescan the entire thing to see what changed. It can also be used to explain the meaning and relationships of interface elements, and even teach users how to do things-all without making an interface more complex. Brief books for people who make websites.įor example, animation can help offload some of the work (PDF) of processing interface changes from our brains to the screen.
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