Website Animation
When we say animation we’re not talking about recreating Toy Story, we’re sure that would be heaps of fun but do you know what’s even more exciting? Website animation. Well maybe it’s just us, but there are plenty of ways you can enhance your business website with cool and clever animations to improve the overall user experience. As we know the user experience is vital to a successful business website, and we’re whizzes when it comes to website animation.
Remember when websites were static pages crammed with as much information as possible on one singular page – we do, it still makes us shudder. Websites used to be a bit dull really, there was little to no attention paid on the user experience. They were simply used to display information – quite a lot of information. Back then the tools weren’t available to fashion exciting visual displays or interesting and interactive icons. Fast-forward to today and website design has been transformed, allowing us to integrate striking animations and high-quality designs into every website we have the pleasure of building or enhancing at Geek Unique.
What’s so great about website animation? Buckle up, we’re going to give you the low-down on how animated designs can benefit your website. We know a thing or two about building and optimising websites to be engaging, eye-catching and improve those all important conversion rates.
Do animations play a crucial role in increasing conversions? They certainly do. By integrating striking animations with your website you can encourage visitors to take certain steps or highlight specific features, you can guide users to various pages on the site and make the overall experience much simpler for them.
Website animation is often overlooked when planning the overall design of a website – but animations are fundamental to a great user experience. There are several key types of website animations that we’re going to list below – you might recognise some of them when we go into more detail:
Menu animations
Using animations on menus really improves the user experience, by keeping the menu interactive you allow the user to see all the content on the page whilst making it easy for them to navigate their way around.
Page Transitions
Who doesn’t love a smooth transition? Nothing screams ‘check out my super fancy website’ more than an effortless transition from page to page. Furthermore, you’re enhancing the user experience and setting your website apart from the other outdated somewhat stagnant websites out there. This definitely gives the wow-factor and can be dressed up or down depending on your vision for your website.
Parallax
Parallax is just as fancy as it sounds, this animation is typically used in the background portion of pages creating a seamless effect whilst the user scrolls. It’s sleek and lends a contemporary feel to any website.
Tool Tips
Want extra information? Tool Tips is the perfect animation for this. You’ll often find it on forms, it’s used to help visitors understand what the specific fields are for and specifies how they should be filled out. Filling out forms can be a chore, by using this tool you’re making the entire process much easier for the end user – bringing you one step closer to improving those conversion rates.
Input Animations
These helpful website animations prompt visitors to fix any errors they may have inputted or to fill in any missing fields they might have missed. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to complete a form because you don’t know which field you’ve filled out incorrectly, so as you can imagine this form of animation is quite popular.
Hover Effects
If you want to engage a visitor with a specific item, the hover effect is a must-have. When the user passes their cursor over a particular item – it will catch their attention. Commonly used to show an element that is clickable – like a contact us button or a product avatar.
Loading animations
Loading animations are brilliant for keeping the visitor engaged whilst a page loads – they can show the level of progress or how much time remains. This stops the user from thinking that there might be an internet connection error – however with our super speedy page loading times this isn’t something you should worry about too much.
Scroll animation
This animation is where elements appear or move as you navigate down the page. It stops visitors from becoming lost on your website, these animations stop the user from losing their way on the page and improve navigation. Subsequently preventing the visitor from becoming frustrated when they can’t find their way.
With the remarkable improvement in website design in the last 10 years, website animation now plays a key part in drawing more users in and keeps them on pages for longer. Now, you don’t need to go overboard with website animation, your website doesn’t need to resemble a digital replica of Las Vegas to keep your visitors interested. You can use subtle animations to guide them around the website or to accentuate specific features. User attention is often influenced by animations, which is why they are used. Engaging visitors is the key to a successful business website – users that are engaged are more likely to click, buy and enquire. Another interesting outcome is that with high user engagement – audience loyalty also increases.
What Are The Benefits of Website Animation
Well, apart from all the amazing reasons we’ve listed above, there are some other interesting advantages of using animations.
First and foremost, they capture attention! Which in this day and age is actually really difficult to do. Attention spans are considerably shorter now – the average attention span of a Millenial is 12 seconds and the average for Gen Z is only 8 seconds. That doesn’t give you a lot of time to work with but well placed animations can cut through all the hubbub online and instantly engage your audience.
Interactive website designs guide your visitors and show them how to make the necessary calls to action. For instance, highlighting the progress a user is making when filling out a form, ultimately spurs them on to complete it.
Reducing your user’s cognitive load by providing them with a more interesting means to learn about your business is way more effective than piling heaps of information into one page and expecting the visitor to read it. It relays back to attention spans, you need to capture it quickly and deliver your message succinctly.
Accentuating your call-to-action is vital, animation can be used to direct the user to this stage – whether it’s an online enquiry form, to visit your store or to make a call. You can push the visitor to this step by making it attractive to them.
Website animation encourages visitors to keep scrolling, after all it’s exciting, why wouldn’t they want to see more?
Speaking of exciting, now it’s time for the truly techy bit. UI design (user interface design) and UX Design (user experience design). These two terms are often used interchangeably – which hasn’t helped with the confusion around their purpose but we’re here to explain what they are and the role they play when it comes to your website and website animations.
What’s The Difference Between UI and UX?
In a nutshell, UX applies to the overall experience and UI focuses on design and interactivity. Too brief? Ok, User Experience Design focuses on the interaction between the user and the product/ service – and all the various elements encountered from start to finish. UX Design considers key points such as how the experience makes the visitor feel and how easy the overall process is for them to complete, for instance: is the checkout process easy?
The main goal of UX design is to provide an efficient, relevant and enjoyable experience for the user. UX Design is all about the overall experience for the customer, it doesn’t focus on the visual elements – that would be UI Design.
When it comes to building an incredible website, UI design is pretty important. UI concentrates on the look, feel and interactivity of the website. This process ensures that the user interface of a website is as intuitive as possible, it requires careful consideration of every visual and interactive element the visitor might come across. Things that a UI designer will focus on include typography, icons, buttons, colour schemes, responsive design, imagery and animations. The main goal of UI is to guide the user through the website interface visually by developing an intuitive experience which doesn’t require the user to think too much. UI Design is what brings your website to life, by considering all of the visual aspects of a user’s journey, from the different touchpoints the user will encounter such as scrolling down the page or browsing through an image gallery.
Imagine you’re looking at your new Geek Unique website. UI is the font, the navigation, the smooth transitions and mind-blowing animations. UX is the feeling of delight when you use it.