People have high expectations when they get to your website. Your web visitors are hoping you will guide them to valuable information and make it easy to consume. That means you have to help move them from their transformative starting “point A” to their goal “point B”. Web animation can enhance user experience by providing helpful signposts, positive feedback and contextual enhancement.
Asking, “why web animation?” is the same question as, “why do people draw ideas on napkins?”. Animation helps tell better visual stories that will result in better results. Motion stories are often entertaining, persuasive and result in better recall for your audience. It’s the people coming to your website that are the important part, not the content.
But too much animation can be a distraction and bad animation can be a repellant. So, it’s important to know what to animate, how much action to add and, most importantly, when (timing) to animate. There are, of course, no set rules.
Why describe a solution with 1000 words when a moving visual image can communicate it in seconds? Why force your web visitors to do more work than they have to?