Use Animation with Care in User Interfaces

Only a psychopath would deliberately make elements of their UI move while users attempt to interact with it, forcing users to “press and guess” as they try to tap or click controls—that’s more like a video game than a usable digital product.

The prevalence of Flash on the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to many designers introducing UI animation just because they could, and it’s almost always a bad idea. Unfortunately, the UI can and does move due to unintentional factors and users are left frustrated.

Do the following scenarios feel familiar?

Have you had a web page load, but the advertising elements (or custom fonts) are served from a different, slower server? As the page loads, the introduction of these ads or fonts “shunts” the page elements around, meaning that you click or tap on the wrong part of the page.

This can be solved by testing, then introducing placeholders...