Published on November 28, 2023
Your users are far more impatient than Goldfish. Sounds crazy, right? Well, while a Goldfish has an average attention span of 9 seconds, your human users are only bothered for as little as 8 seconds.
It’s no surprise, really. They are always in a rush and are already exposed to abundant information. This makes them apt in tuning the necessary information to make it selective with their attention. Yet, it’s imperative to dig out how to hold them still for more than mere 8 seconds.
At Animoox, we’ve done our fair share of research to find out what needs to be done to hold on to their attention. In our excavation, we came across some statistics laid out by Salesforce, one of which claims 80% of customers have claimed that the experience created by an organization is just as important to them as its products and services. So, when they spend more time on a certain website it is because they find value in it. They get a feel-good experience. If the website fails to offer that experience, the users are going to lose interest in spite of the website being terrifically designed.
And what makes an experience ‘good’, depends on whether it was successful at offering value or that it solved a real problem.
How Animations Provide Backup To The User Interface
With the importance of brands to provide a fluid digital user experience on the rise, the use of dynamic animations has become just as important. The increasing rate of online users, especially, after the pandemic, incited global brands to bridge the gap between digital and real-world experiences. In such a phenomenon, animations play an instrumental role.
Animations help to make storytelling more progressive and subtle. From micro-animation to logo animation, functional animations can successfully complement support interaction. A few of their attributes are demonstrated below:
The Smoothness of Microinstructions
Micro-interactions deliver real-time feedback to the users. Usually, through conveying system status or preventing users from making errors. These sorts of animations serve a logical purpose. They help prevent change blindness.
Pulls Out Boredom Out of a Loading Screen
Forget about attention span. Loading screens are annoying. And we wholeheartedly acknowledge that. The least any user can wait is just 2 to 3 seconds. But when you want them to at least have a peek into your website, you need to ensure that the wait is worth it. In this case, animated loading screens come in handy. They keep the users engaged while preparing the website content to appear on the screen.
Interconnected Steps in Multi-Step Process
The actions we take on the website to achieve a particular objective are interconnected. It’s an entire journey, after all. So, the steps should be sequential and interconnected. To create progressive disclosure, which is connecting each step to create an entire journey, animations are helpful to the designers. This process makes the interface much more convenient to learn since it decreases the amount of information presented at a particular time
How Lottie Animation Solves the Day?
We all love stories.
Be it under the evening sky at our grandmother’s village or in the company of friends and strangers, we all love a good story. It’s only natural that we’re going to stay just for a while longer when a company tells us an interesting story. That too, with motion design.
When it comes to narrating stories, motion design is the best. In a human-centered design, where the user is considered to be the protagonist, animation helps in building an everlasting connection. Animation, thus, helps to capture user attention through visual storytelling. Be it 5 seconds or 8, rest assured, your user is going to stick for a while longer when there is an animation narrating a gripping story.
As users stick by a little bit longer than expected, the conversion rates become higher, and engagement increases in just a blink of an eye. But then again, you need to ensure that the animation you incorporated is not clunky to make your users lose interest or worse, slow down a website. If that happens, they will bid adieu for good.
So, you wouldn’t want to clutter your website with a crowd of animations. That’ll be annoying on a different level. Neither do you want to put a small number of animations that fail to meet its storytelling purpose. This is where Lottie animation saves the day.
Absolute superheroes when it comes to visual storytelling, Lottie animations can be incorporated anywhere without having their quality ruined. They are a lightweight textual form of animation, that is, they greatly reinforce the existing UI/UX solutions. Even after such dynamism, the loading time isn’t negatively impacted.
