There’s no doubt that animating user interfaces is a rising trend. Risen enough that the emphasis is often put on the animation itself, rather than on improving the user experience through subtle and functional animation. Pasquale D’Silva gave some good advice in his talk at Web Direction South in 2013, including:
Good animation is invisible.
You shouldn’t notice that you’re looking at animation.
It’s great advice that we — the team behind Campaign Monitor’s email builder — have been trying to apply with a few principles in mind: animation must improve the usability, feel natural and subtle, and give feedback to the user.
Having spent the last year working on the email builder, I’ve learned that animation on the web — as opposed to native apps — comes with many challenges that go beyond finding the right timing, spacing, poses or easing. Animations just don’t render the same on all devices and browsers, and that rendering inconsistency has led us to compromise things to create a good user experience. In fact, some beautiful and useful interactions on our powerful 27" iMacs didn’t make it to the final product, because they felt jerky and slow on a device some of our users were more likely to use.
