Today, using animation techniques in a website can be said common as web design. Web animations are a powerful tool to guide the user’s attention and express the brand’s concepts in a very enticing way and let the company stand out from the competition.
I’ll show about 5 innovative animation techniques for making effective websites.
1. Navigation
This navigation animation is familiar for current users. It uses motion to guide users in website and helps them orient by using movement to indicate how elements are related to one another. Users can proceed to next pages by clicking icons, and it let them keep to focus on main areas of websites.
There is 5 advantages to use this “navigation” technique,
- Organize User Experience (UX) architecture
- Break sites into categories
- Let customers easily find the content of each category
- Decrease the time users spend on searching for items on a website
- Make pages more accessible
2. Scrolling
It is a feature on a website where elements appear or move as you move (scroll) down the page. Positive impact of “scrolling” technique is that making websites visually attractive. A smooth scrolling makes customer experience better and results in increased engagement. It might be able to create an emotional connection with users by longreads scrolling.
There is 4 main advantageous reasons of scroll animation,
- On-scroll animation effects keep users engaged
- Scrolling effects help page load time
- Animation when scrolling can direct attention to a call-to-action
- Website scrolling effects prevent users from becoming lost when navigating.
“Animation can be used to make transitions more obvious, so it’sclear what happened between where the user started and ended up.”
Matt Eller
3. Storytelling
A special look at interactive storytelling that the way in which websites can pull viewers into their world and deliver their messgae through the power of dynamic and interactive technology and design features. This animation technique can be useful to figure out a way directly involve the user in the story. The image 3 is about wallet-slimming. “Bellroy Wallets” are designed to take up less space, even the users filled with the same amount of cards as other wallets. It shows the customers comparison between “Bellroy Wallets” and their competitors by sliding scale from zero to ten cards.
4. 3D Animation
3D animations provide more opportunities for designers to create realistic and complex visuals that make viewers focus. Some 3D animations react to user’s moveing such as key clicks, mouse clicks, button clicks, and finger movement on devices, so this animation technique make users interactive and can be served as decorative elements of websites. It’s common practive to put 3D animation on main pages to welcome and entertain users in their first minutes of visiting a website. This image 4 shows the website of Apple; MacBook Pro.
5. Loading Time Animation
(It sometimes make me so irritated…)
When a visitor clicks on a link or button on a website, they expect to see more kind of feedback. However, if nothing happen, most of them will conclude that something is wrong. As well as, they will quickly navigate away before they realize the site has been processing their request. This animation technique prevent these kinds of happenings and provide a much better user experience by letting people know that their request is being processed.
Image 5 “Infinite Loading Animation” ask the user to wait without indicating how long it takes for loading. This type of animation can be used when the waiting time in unknown or very short.
Image 6 “Progress Bar” indicates how long it will take for the page to load by using percentage, volume, or fraction. This can also be visual estimate like a circle being drawn or a bar filling up.
Image 7 shows “Calming Cat Loading Gif”. This is one of strategies that make users feel comfortable or heal by putting a cute cat. There are many kinds of strategies that try not let users irritated or be stressful while loading.
To summarize,
These animation techniques are increasing as an effective web design. There are many advantages to use these animation such as attracts attention to a website, act as a navigator for users, keep visitors engages for a longer time, increases user interaction, create an emotional connection with viewers and improve the overall website experiences. Therefore, these animation techniques are necessary for making an effective website.
