Functional Animation
Sarah Drasner
Manager, UX Design and Engineering
at Trulia (Zillow Group)
@sarah_edo : twitter || @sdras : codepen
Generate Conf, New York 2016
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.
Right tool for the right job
Use appropriately
how?
context-shifting
Helps with spatial awareness
- Morphing
- Revealing
- Isolation
- Style
- Anticipatory cues
- Interaction
- Space Conservation
- Responsive
Subtlety and consistency.
From this CSS-Tricks Article
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?
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 (Greensock)
this pen.
This pen.
style and Branding (react-motion)
STYLE AND BRANDING
this pen.
STYLE AND BRANDING
Motion Design Language
- Consider your tooling- loss leader
- Reuse resources like easing functions, animation keyframes in mixins, extends, variables, you name it!
- If mobile is decoupled- easier to keep it consistent across both
- Good animation branding guidelines means less communication down the line and reinventing the wheel.
STYLE AND BRANDING
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
Interaction
space conservation
responsive
This pen.
SVG!
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
Before we get started:
Animation Performance!
- People expect mobile to be faster than web
- JankFree.org
- Advanced Performance Audits with DevTools by Paul Irish
- CSS-Tricks Article: Weighing SVG Animation Techniques with Benchmarks
- Above all else: test things yourself!
correct tools for the job
my recommendations:
CSS/SCSS
- Small sequences and simple interactions
- Once you get more than 3... switch to:
GSAP (GreenSock)
- Great for sequencing and complex movement
- Cross-browser consistency
React-Motion
- Great for single movements that you'd like to look realistic
- Snap.svg is more like jQuery for SVG
- Web Animations API looks great, still waiting on support
- Velocity is similar to GSAP with less bells and whistles
- Mo.js looks great and is still in beta
Standalone as Illustration
Standalone SVG as an Illustration of Text
Very easy to implement. SVG stays a consistent size.
greensock (gsap)
Solves Cross-Browser Inconsistencies
Bad transform origin bug on rotation, soon to be solved in Firefox.
More in this CSS-Tricks article.
Chrome
IE
Firefox
Safari (zoomed)
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.
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();
});
...
Design + Information + Animation
Revisiting old approaches
Responsive animated Infographic
Three Sources with Detailed Analysis Showing Lead Improvements
Conversion
(one source example, The Whole Brain Group)
- increased traffic to their website by over 400%
- lead increase by almost 4500%
- the number of new visitors to their site to almost 78%
Problems
- Not responsive- tipping point: Tim Kadlec
- Not updated to current context
- ^ Especially design
All posts older than 2 years.
What Happened?
This pen.
Change the viewBox in JavaScript:
Responsive:
Responsive:
Media queries for layout, and fallback with Modernizr:
/* media query example element, mobile first */
@media (max-width: 825px) {
container {
width: 100%;
}
}
@media (min-width: 826px) {
.container {
width: 825px;
}
}
/* fallback */
.inlinesvg .fallback {
display: none;
}
.no-inlinesvg .fallback {
width: 500px;
height: 500px;
display: block;
}
Accessibility
Title and associative aria tags: (WIP)
<svg aria-labelledby="title" id="svg" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 765 587">
<title id="title" lang="en">Circle of icons that illustrate Global Warming Solutions</title>
You can also add a title for elements in the SVG DOM
This resource, with support charts.
Also, this article by Dudley Storey.
context-shifting
- Morphing
- Revealing
- Isolation
- Style
- Anticipatory cues
- Interaction
- Space Conservation
- Responsive
Subtlety and consistency.
Social Coding Sites Help You Learn
Fun. Remember fun?
(I don't work for them and they don't pay me)
- Codepen
- JS Fiddle
- Dabblet
People You Should Know About
- Val Head
- Sara Soueidan
- Rachel Nabors
- Tiffany Rayside
- Chris Gannon
- CJ Gammon
- LegoMushroom
- Ana Tudor
- David Walsh Blog
- Gregor Adams
- Diaco ML
- Amelia Bellamy-Royds
- Taylor Hunt
- Dudley Storey
- GreenSock
- I Hate Tomatoes (Petr Tichy)
- Lucas Bebber
- Rachel Smith
- Joni Trythall
- Jake Albaugh
- Blake Bowen
- Matt DesLauriers
More!
Designing Interface Animations- Val Head
Web Animation Weekly
More Technical Information:
Frontend Masters Course
Advanced SVG Animation
O'Reilly Book
SVG Animation
Thank You!
@sarah_edo on twitter
@sdras on codepen
These Slides:
Functional Animation
By sdrasner
Functional Animation
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