I don't think there's anything bad with animation per se. If you look around you, lots of things are naturally animated. Turning a page on a book is "animation". Unzipping your bag, opening a drawer etc. is also "animation". Unlike computers, the physical world is not built around discrete states. This doesn't mean that our designs must emulate 100% of the real world, but there is a lot that can we can learn from it. For example, you can half-open a drawer and take a quick peek inside - as soon as you realise this is not the drawer you want, you can close it quicker than if it was fully open.
So far few interfaces have taken advantage of such nuances: an interesting example is Bumptop (http://www.bumptop.com/). The danger of animation is that, unless you learn a good lesson from the physical world, you can easily design something that is unnatural & excessive. If people see "physical" animations every day, they have certain expectations what they should look like. Taking physics into account, as is done in Bumptop or in the iPhone UI goes a long way towards fulfilling such expectations. The context of use is also important in determining the pace & amount of animation. Again, taking an example from the physical world, the animation that you get in your visual field is much different if you're in a fairground (where everything is animated and trying to attract your attention) than when you're sitting in a quite room turning the pages of a book. Animation has sometimes been given a bad name because of two things: over-zealous out-of-context use, and performance issues that make it look completely unnatural. If you manage to steer away from those issues, then I don't think it's an "overkill". Hope this helps! Alex P.S. Animation has also been discussed earlier in the following posts: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=17083 http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=17082 http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=16373 On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Rob Nero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > (no, that isn't a typo) > > Has anyone encountered motion sickness on a website or webapp that animates > the interaction too much? > > I am in the middle of designing a new navigational paradigm for enterprise > webapps that would heavily use the scriptaculous animation framework. The > idea is that each click of diving deeper into the application and content, > each layer deeper would animate onto the screen to show the relationship of > content. > > While watching a coworker demonstrate a prototype he developed, I started > getting concerned that too much animation might be a bad thing. Though it > nicely illustrates the relationships of the content, maybe it is overkill? > > Your thoughts or experience? > thanks! > Rob > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
