When Animation Goes Awry

Web Design January 15, 2008

Too many sites overuse animation. It's supposed to be a subtlety that adds to the overall user experience by making something more intuitive. For example, having something slide in and out can be very useful if you're mimicking a drawer (such as sliding comments in and out on a blog post). Other times, animation can just be unnecessary and annoying because of the time it takes.

Animation also serves to let the user see what is happening rather than just display something quickly. In some cases, simply showing/hiding something instantaneously can cause confusion. Note how in Mac OS X when you minimize a window, you see the animation as it actually shrinks and places itself in the dock. If it simply disappeared and appeared in the dock, you could probably get confused as to where your window went!

But besides Javascript effects, the other kind of animation popular on the web is through Flash. And that's just what the site is if there's too much useless animation - flashy. You'll see this kind of design most often on classy restaurant websites. It's okay to use animation as long as it doesn't run longer than the user's attention span, which, I read, is about 8 seconds.

I found this survey conducted by Akamai Technologies on "Threshold of Acceptability for Retail Web Page Response Times". In it, they surveyed over 1,000 web users and found that if, say, an eCommerce website took longer than 4 seconds to load, 75% of the participants would not return to the site!

How frustrating is it to go to a restaurant site to find their phone number and have to sit through a 10-second animation of images before you actually enter the site only to be confused by their navigation , unable to find what you were looking for?

So please. Keep the animations to when they actually enhance the user experience rather than detract from it.

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