30- second Summary:-
- The best user experience should ultimately align both the business and customer goals to create an effective and functional solution to a real problem.
- Animations can improve user experience, increase user engagement, communicate feedback, and guide user behavior. However, they should not be overused, as they can easily distract users.
- Animation formats like Lottie, a lightweight textual form of animation, offer digital products like websites and apps solutions to enhance UI UX without burdening the load and negatively impacting performance.
In an increasingly digitized world, it’s becoming critical to offer users a frictionless, seamless digital experience that aligns with their requirements. With the appropriate tools at their disposal, brands now have the opportunity to impact their entire digital ecosystem. User experience (UX) is possibly one of the most effective ways to drive consumer engagement, and brand affinity.
The end goal of UX is to enhance the relationship between a product and its users. A rapidly evolving phenomenon, user experience wields the ability to shape a product’s trajectory. A defining characteristic of strategic thinking, what makes an experience ‘good’ hinges on whether it was successful at offering value or that it solved a real problem.
The Existing Challenges With UX
The incessant demand for quick satisfaction and constant connectedness is making it difficult to hold a consumer’s attention. To add to this, our weakened attention spans demand instant results. A variety of factors can be a source of user distraction when browsing web pages or apps - usability issues, slow loading time, or cluttered visuals and text that drown out the main messaging.
As stated in research, 80% of customers say the experiences provided by a company are as important to them as its products and services. User attention is a limited resource and if users choose to spend their time on a particular website or app, they’re signaling that they find value in it. That said, no matter how well-designed a user interface is, at some point or another, users are going to lose interest.
According to Donald Porter, VP at British Airways, ‘customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to fix things when they go wrong’. A common mistake, most brands focus on their business goals, making it difficult for users to engage with their digital presence. Built with your business in mind, your online presence is designed to deliver information about the brand or the service it provides. This offers knowledge but no real engagement or use to the user, let alone attention to functional elements, such as function, flow, or speed.
A Solution to The UX Problem - Animation
Motion helps in narrating stories. Well-designed animations make the experience feel curated. In a human-centered design approach, where the user is the central focus, animation can help in forging a connection. Whether or not the visitor converts into a loyal customer depends entirely on the experience provided through the website or app in the first 3–5 seconds. With the first 5 seconds of page load time having the highest impact on conversion rates, animation helps in captivating user attention through visual storytelling. Your brand can begin to experience higher conversion rates, elevated user action, and more engagement as a trickle-down effect of the narratives that animations help create.
In a hyper-competitive environment, the cost of new customer acquisition is at an all-time high. Hence, you must incorporate animation in everything that your brand digitizes – so that every user touchpoint delivers an optimized experience. Yet, even well-intentioned but clunky animation can distract users from their aim, clutter an interface, or even slow down a website.
How Animation Support The User Interface
With global brands vying to bridge the gap between digital and real-world experiences, an interactive, yet fluid digital user experience is at the very core of a successful brand. The goal for every brand is to build a seamless user interface, which is where animations play an instrumental role. There are a lot of things you can convey very subtly with animation. From micro-animations, logo animations to emotional animations, functional animations can effectively complement support interaction.
- Microinteractions
A form of functional animation, microinteractions deliver real-time feedback to the user, typically through conveying system status or helping users prevent errors. These animations serve a logical purpose, helping prevent change blindness.
- Take the Monotony Out of a Loading Screen
Users are willing to wait just 2-3 seconds for a website or app to load, and any extra second of delay can cause them to leave. Animated loading screens can be used to keep users engaged as they wait for content to appear on their screen.
- Connect Distinctive Steps in Multi-Step Process
In certain cases, users need to go through a series of steps to complete an action. It should be clear that these steps are connected to each other. Animation can help designers to create progressive disclosure, which is connecting each step to create a whole journey. This method makes the interface easier to learn, as it reduces the amount of information presented at a given time.
Benefits of Animations
Animation can influence behavior and bring the interface to life. An effective tool for increasing user retention rate, reducing website bounce rate, and generating quality leads, animations are undoubtedly the best method for conveying complex ideas in a simple manner. Additionally, animations are particularly helpful in lead conversions, as they offer a fun, engaging alternative to text content and are certainly an upgrade from static infographics.
The best UI animations have both a unique visual appeal, purpose, and functionality. They have been intentionally inserted in the interface for a user-centered reason, and they have been executed well visually. With each brand aiming to deliver a unique user experience, animations help you in designing custom user interfaces that captivate, engage and convert. A lightweight, yet scalable form of animation, Lottie enables designers to easily integrate animations on any platform – mobile or web. A multi-platform animation, Lottie supports integration of high-quality animations that can be manipulated at run-time. A successful example of Lottie implementation is a Belgium beer company, which tested Lottie animations for 12 months and, according to data, their conversion ratio increased by an incredible 25%.
Animation – The Future for Narrating Brand Stories
Design animation is a multifaceted aspect of design tools. Its multifunctionality enables it to enhance the experience of almost every part of your design, while reinforcing your user’s spatial awareness, connecting them from one part of the interface to another. An ideal combination of creativity, functionality, and innovation, animation is a powerful tool when used appropriately.
A staggering 90% of customers are willing to pay more when companies provide personalized customer services. These B2C consumer habits are informing how brands run — making user experience the cornerstone of success. In this digital age, it’s vital to adapt and show you are relevant, especially if you’re in an industry that is growing at a breakneck speed, such as technology.
Here's how Headspace embraces Lottie animations to bring a joyful and mindful experience to its users.
Animations are a great solution for keeping your content fresh and relevant for evolving user behavioral patterns. A driving force within the design community, animations will continue to spearhead initiatives for communicating ideas, narrating stories, and interacting with users. The future of animation truly lies in the ability of creatives to continue to explore new possibilities. And of course, there are thousands of freely available animations on LottieFiles to use, all of which could save you tons of time while creating a better user experience.
Follow LottieFiles case studies page to see how brands uses Lottie animations to make products stand out, look aesthetically pleasing, and engage users deeply.
