Functional Animation

Sarah Drasner

@sarah_edo : twitter || @sdras : codepen

Fronteers, Amsterdam 2016

Sarah Drasner

let's start from the beginning.

what happens when you visit a website?

Creating Spatial Awareness

Saccade

why is this important?

We already use this information

Websites start to all look the same
Buttons on a website as CTAs are the most powerful thing
Growth-hacking
User-testing

Animation gets a bad rap.

invisible animation

Immersive animation

Invisible animation

UX Animation & UX Choreography

Mental Maps

context-shifting in UX

Interruption

Spacial Maps - connecting two states

smoothstate.js

Spacial Maps - cognitive leaks

Kathy Sierra- Badass: Making Users Awesome

Morphing

From this CSS-Tricks Article

Isolation

Revealing

xxx Modals die 4eva xxx
breaks context
"brute force" UX

modals suck!

it's not them, it's their typical UX pattern!

Revealing

style and branding:

Not one size fits all

Adhering to your branding means motion solves the problem for your users.

What happens repeatedly
Easing structures
User flow
Toggle on/off?

You're on a trip exploring a city

You want to build out the day of activities

Lonely Planet

but...

Google Maps

Let's empower the user

This demo.

If animation just feels like the sugar on top, that's because you treated it that way.

Tough love

Do you hate animation?

STYLE AND BRANDING

This pen.

style and Branding (react-motion)

STYLE AND BRANDING

this pen.

anticipatory cues

Custom Loaders:

Viget did an experiment and found that despite some individual variation, novel loaders as a whole had a higher wait time and lower abandon rate than generic ones

22 sec

14 sec

Loading times

Treehouse: Percieved Performance

Spatial Awareness

Interaction

seat preview from codrops

drag n drop for spatial awareness

space conservation

Right tool for the right job

Performance

Opacity
Transforms
Hardware Acceleration

@mixin accelerate() {
 transform: translateZ(0);
 backface-visibility: hidden;
 perspective: 1000px;
}

.foo {
  @include accelerate(transform);
}

Resources:

Debugging Keyframe Animations

High Performance Animations

Hardware Acceleration vs CONTROL

this pen.

src: Wealthfront

Case Study: Netflix

IMMersive Animation

The purpose is to call attention

Dom/Virtual DOM

Great for UI/UX animation
Great for SVG that is resolution independent
Easier to debug

Canvas

Dance, pixels, dance!
Great for really impressive 3d or immersive stuff
Movement of a tons of objects

Pros

Cons

Harder to make accessible
Not resolution independent out of the box
Breaks to nothing

Tanks with a lot of objects
^ Because of this you have to care about the way you animate

SVG!

Crisp on any display
Less HTTP requests to handle
Easily scalable for responsive
Small filesize if you design for performance
Easy to animate
Easy to make accessible

Flash is dead! Long live flash!

Interactive, immersive
Narrative
UI/UX Animations
Prototyping
Data Visualizations

SVG ANIMATION:

What is it good for?

This pen.

responsive

This pen.

Small filesize + performance

Compare to using text with photos to illustrate an article.

8KB Gzipped.

That Whole Animation and SVG was

greensock (gsap)

Solves Cross-Browser Inconsistencies

Bad transform origin bug on rotation, soon to be solved in Firefox.

Timeline

stack tweens
set them a little before and after one another
change their placement in time
group them into scenes
add relative labels
animate the scenes!
make the whole thing faster, move the placement of the whole scene, nesting

All without recalculation

The issue with longer CSS animations:

This pen.

GreenSock Teaching Monster

syntax

Percentage-Based Transforms on SVG!

get excited.

This pen courtesy of GreenSock.

We can do stuff like this, All fully responsive in every direction

It doesn't neccessarily have to be fully fluid, either. Let's Implement some Responsive Design.

Designing Interaction in Responsive Animations

Like legos.

This pen.

//variable declaration for the global repeated animations
var gear = $("#gear1, #gear2, #gear3");
...

//animation that's repeated for all of the sections
function revolve() {
  var tl = new TimelineMax();

  tl.add("begin");
  tl.to(gear, 4, {
      transformOrigin: "50% 50%",
      rotation: 360,
      ease: Linear.easeNone
    }, "begin");
    ...

  return tl;
}

var repeat = new TimelineMax({repeat:-1});
repeat.add(revolve());

function paintPanda() {
  var tl = new TimelineMax();

  tl.to(lh, 1, {
    scaleY: 1.2,
    rotation: -5,
    transformOrigin: "50% 0",
    ease: Circ.easeOut
  }, "paintIt+=1");
  ...

  return tl;
}

//create a timeline but initially pause it so that we can control it via click
var triggerPaint = new TimelineMax({
  paused: true
});
triggerPaint.add(paintPanda());

//this button kicks off the panda painting timeline
$("#button").on("click", function(e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  triggerPaint.restart();
});

...

Accessibility

Title and associative aria tags:

<svg aria-labelledby="title" 
  id="svg" 
  role="presentation" 
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
  viewBox="0 0 765 587">
<title id="title" 
  lang="en">
  Icons that illustrate Global Warming Solutions
</title>

Title for elements in the SVG DOM

Role to let the screen reader know whether to traverse

This resource, with support charts.

This article by Heather Migliorisi.

This pen.

Narrative

This pen.

Main Principle:

Design everything first, slowly unveil things.

Ugly storyboards save you time!

This pen.

Created with web Technologies!

React

SVG

GreenSock

How did we use SVG?

Three ways:

Directly inline in the HTML, for loops
Background images, for things like taco
Inline in React

const HeartMeter = React.createClass({
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <svg className="heartmeter" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="250" height="50" viewBox="0 0 1741.8 395.6">
          <path d="M1741.8 197.7c0 109.3-89 197.8-198.8 197.8a198.6 198.6 0 0 1-158.5-78.4H11.2A11.2 11.2 0 0 1 0 305.9V89.5a11.2 11.2 0 0 1 11.2-11.1h1373.4A198.8 198.8 0 0 1 1543 0c109.8 0 198.8 88.5 198.8 197.7z" fill="#000"/>
          <path d="M1591.8 127c-18.3 0-34.1 14.8-41.4 30.3-7.3-15.5-23.1-30.3-41.4-30.3a45.7 45.7 0 0 0-45.7 45.5c0 51.1 51.8 64.5 87.1 115.1 33.4-50.2 87.1-65.6 87.1-115.1a45.7 45.7 0 0 0-45.7-45.5z" fill="#b29968"/>
          <rect x="68.2" y="140.8" width={this.props.score} height="101.55" fill="#9391aa"/>
        </svg>
      </div>
    )
  }
});

How did we animate?

FOUR ways:

GSAP looping in functions outside React
RAF to detect collisions
GSAP for keypress events
Repeating callbacks for tacos and margaritas

GSAP for Animation

  _flyBy: function(el, amt, name, delay) {
    if (this.props._isGameOver()) return;
    ...

    TweenMax.fromTo(el, amt, {
      rotation:0, 
      y:randY, 
      x:window.innerWidth + 200
    }, {
      x: -200,
      y:randY,
      rotation: 360,
      delay: delay, 
      onComplete:this._flyBy,
      onCompleteParams:[el, amt, name, delay],
      ease: Power1.easeInOut
    });
  },

Sound, Interaction, Animation

//balloon
function balloonGrow(){
  var balloon = $("#balloon")[0];
  var radius = balloon.getAttribute("r");
  var cySet = balloon.getAttribute("cy");
  balloon.setAttribute('r', parseInt(radius) + 10);
  balloon.setAttribute('cy', parseInt(cySet) - 10);
  if (parseInt(radius) > 125) {
    ion.sound.play("balloon-pop3");
    var balloonTl = new TimelineMax();
    balloonTl.add("pop");
    balloonTl.to("#balloon", 0.05, {
      scale: 5,
      opacity: 0,
      transformOrigin: "50% 50%",
      ease: Circ.easeOut
    }, "pop");
    ...
    setTimeout(function(){
      balloon.setAttribute("r", "45");
      balloon.setAttribute("cy", "233.5");
    }, 200);
  }
}