Title: Designing the Spaces Between
Context: An impassioned rant on the necessity for animations and transitions. As a member of the choir, I enjoy being preached to sometimes.
Synopsis: Stuff in real life moves. Unless it doesn’t. Then it’s either dead or a newspaper. Which, in case you haven’t heard, are dying. And people like stuff that moves. That’s why most kids would take a pet dog over a pet rock any day. People respond better to stuff that’s ALIVE! Static stuff is boring while motion is the stuff of “Ohhhh”s and “Ahhhh”s. But to be fair, motion can be hard to get right. And hard to develop. And certainly hard to convincingly argue to other people that it should prioritized over that other feature that their users are demanding that they put into the product ASAP. You know that feature. Yes, the one that they use while yawning right before ditching your product for the viscerally kick-ass client that satisfies their hungry eyes and primordial minds with subtle transitions and pleasing state transitions. But the problem is really ours as designers. If we really, really, really want these slick motion graphics as part of our product we need to stop delivering all of our spec documents in static, old-school, sit-there-and-stare formats. You get out of a product what you put into it. So maybe it’s time to spend a little less time aligning pixels and a little more pushing them all over the screen.
Best Bit: “Brands that can deliver satisfying transitions and well-integrated kinetics are the ones that delight their customers.”
via uxmatters.com
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