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Recently I got a little verbal fight with a friend because of animation and usability. It all started with a public Touchscreen. It was nice to play with but, between screens, a sliding animation took place, and, (there’s where it all started) took a bit to release the interface to full interactivity – buttons didn’t work on those final miliseconds or so.

It’s not too much, but that freeze-momentum seems that, if it might be solved easily, it should be solved. On the third action I performed, it started happening to me all the time.

Here is a condensed version of what followed:

Me – “This is sh$%!” (One of the best ways for loosing your audience instantly)

My Friend – “What? Are you nuts? I think this is kinda cool!”

Me – “No, It could be cool… look at that… [problem explanation here]”

My Friend – “But the target user likes it that way”

Me – “… who’s the target user?”

My Friend – “People like attractive things”

Me – “that’s true, but that is not enough… you like it because it is hypish and made with Flash…”

My Friend – “Animations are not evil as you might think!”

(Ok lets break here… my friend scored)

I think He is right. Animations can be a great way of telling your user where something came from or went to. Violent layout changes such as panel rearrangements/resizes/show-hides, may be smoothed out with a carefully designed animation.

On the other side, I think we all should keep “entertainment animations” away from almost any kind of interface (Games and kids stuff are the first exceptions that I can remember).

Back in the time when animated gifs on web pages started to be seen as ridiculous artifacts, Nielsen pointed that “Flash was 99% bad“. Big mistake (by the way, there are some of them from the same author). Just like Javascript, it was used to make a lot of crap, but should global ignorance kill a fantastically designed tool or tecnology?

Neither flash nor animations will kill your interface usability. Bad approaches will.

Writing this article caught my attention toward this subject – I would like to see some studies about the impact of animations in user interactions. I’ll write more on the subject as soon as I find something interesting.