User interface animations are one of the essential design elements of any website or application. How your user interface looks and feels makes a remarkable difference as it has the potential to attract more users. Smooth and eye-catchy animations make the user interface more lively, attractive, and user-friendly. However, these should not distract users from the overall purpose of the app. In this blog, you will learn how to use animations in mobile applications effectively.
As a leading mobile app development company in India, we build the most intuitive mobile applications with fabulous animations that make your app look more attractive and beautiful. Our creative designers follow the best practices for motion designs and use them effectively in your mobile applications. Hire mobile app developers from us to build beautiful, scalable, and intuitive mobile applications for your business.
In this article, we have discussed how we create and use motion designs or animations in mobile applications effectively to help you attract more users and increase conversion rates.
Primary Objectives of Motion Design
Here’s how animation or motion design can make your mobile applications an excellent mobility solution.
• Describes the Logic
The main goal of any animation is to help the app user navigate the mobile application by comprehending the relationships between different user interface components. It enables the app to acknowledge in response to their actions taken to explain the logic or what is happening. Besides, animations can also display the hierarchy of pages and app screens to grab the attention of users to key features and elements.
• Increases User Engagement
Whether it is cross-platform app development or native mobile app development, the ultimate goal is to attract more users, increase user engagement, and boost conversion rates with a mobile solution. User interface animations in mobile applications can encourage users to take actions that are critical for a business. By allowing users to react to social media posts can ensure more interactions and engagements.
• Offers a Distinctive User Experience
Using in-app animations can ensure an unforgettable and delightful user experience. Motion designs reinforce your brand identity by emphasizing the benefits of your brand and conveying your brand value to your app users.
Being a top-notch mobile app development company in India, we will share our experience and expertise in designing beautiful and useful in-app animations. But before creating and enhancing useful motion designs, let’s first understand how they should be placed and what their functions are in your mobile app.
Different Types of Animations
1. Visual Feedback
Visual feedback is essential for a user interface. Visual, audible, and haptic feedback given by an application makes users feel more informed and in control. It acts as a more forthright function that shows that your app is functioning properly. For example, when a button enlarges or a swiped image moves in a specific direction, it is evident that the apps respond appropriately to the users’ input.
Most often users encounter situations when they click on something in an application and nothing happens. For instance, clicking multiple times in a shopping app may increase the number of items in the user’s shopping cart. Such situations lead to awful user experiences and users stop using your app. Using animations in your mobile applications can eliminate them by offering appropriate visual feedback.
2. In-app Element’s Function Change
This type of animation indicates how an in-app design element changes when an end-user interacts with it. It is useful in explaining how the function changes. Animations for function change are usually used with icons, buttons, and other design elements.
3. Structural and Navigational Animations
Many mobile apps have complex structures that require designers to organize them well to ease app navigation as much as possible. In-app motion designs can be a great alternative for fulfilling this task. If your animation indicates where any element is hidden, it will be easier for end-users to locate and explore it.
You can hire mobile app developers from us who can help you organize your app structure to ensure easy navigation for your users.
4. Elemental Hierarchy and Their Communications
Be it a hybrid app or native mobile app development, animations are ideal for displaying elements of the user interface and explaining how they interact with each other. Every user interface element has its own objective and position within the animation. All in-app animations must describe how every element is connected with each other. Therefore, developing the elemental hierarchy and their interactions is essential for creating an intuitive user interface.
5. Visual Signs
Animations tell the app users how to interact with a UI element. It is good to offer visual prompts when an application has an unanticipated pattern of interaction.
6. System State
There are several processes running in the background such as the installation of data from the server, calculations, and many other processes. Therefore, you need to inform your end-users that your app is still working and not crashed or stopped working by showing in-progress processes.
Visual cues of progress indicate your app’s performance. For a better experience, you should consider using different animations for your app’s processes.
7. Unique and Fun Animations
Using unique and fun animations can be beneficial or non-beneficial. These are often used for fun and can greatly make app development a complex process. However, using a unique and attractive animation can offer a memorable experience to users and make your app stand out from the crowd. This is one of the ideal tools that app designers can use to attract more users and increase the usability of their app.
When it comes to designing a fun animation, you need to make sure that it doesn’t cover or hide your key app features. Also, you must see that it doesn’t take enough time of users to complete an action or be quite complicated to manage the animated user interface.
Moreover, to ensure that the in-app animations work properly, your app must be high performing. For this, you need to ensure that your app is backed by ongoing mobile app maintenance services.
As a full-service mobile app development company in India, we offer reliable mobile app maintenance services to keep your mobile app in its optimal condition.
Key Principles of an Ideal Animation Design
To create effective animations in your mobile app, the following principles, originally conveyed by Walt Disney can be effectively implemented in user interface design.
1. Material
Show what your UI element includes whether it is light or heavy, rigid or flexible, or flat or multi-dimensional. Your users must be able to understand how every UI element is communicating with each other.
2. Flight Path Of Movement
Trajectory or flight path determines movement dynamics. Generally, static mechanical objects usually have a straight flight path while dynamic elements have more flexible and less consecutive flight paths. You need to decide which impression your UI should give and implement it.
3. Timing
Timing is another major consideration when designing in-app animations. In reality, physical objects are fixed based on the linear motion rules as they need more time to accelerate and decelerate. So, you can make use of curves to move your objects automatically.
4. The Focus of Animation to Key Areas of the Screen
Animations should hold the attention of users on a particular area of the screen. Let’s say, for example, a blinking icon can notify the end-user. This animation type is often used in interfaces with several elements and details.
5. Follow-through and Overlapping
The follow-through is considered as the conclusion of an action. Elements do not quickly start or stop moving. Every movement can be displayed as a set of smaller changes where every single part of the object is moving at its own speed.
In overlapping, the second action is triggered before the first action gets completed. This holds the interest of the viewers as there’s no dead time between two actions.
6. Secondary Actions
Like the follow-through and overlapping principles, the secondary actions can execute a primary animation. They make the design even more brilliant; however, they can be distracting if it is not carried out properly.
7. Ease-in and out
Ease-in and out is the vital animation design principle that is crucial for general and UI animations in hybrid or native mobile app development. However, this fundamental principle is often ignored.
This principle has been derived from the fact that physical objects can’t start moving or stop quickly. Every object needs some time to fast-track and slow down.
Wrapping Up
Here in this blog, we have discussed types of animation and animation design principles that can help you create a distinctive and useful in-app animation. As an all-encompassing mobile app development company in India, we can help you in designing fabulous animations for your app. We will be glad to help you with our wide range of mobile app development services ranging from wearable device app development to enterprise mobility solutions.
Hire mobile app developers from us who can help you build stunning mobile apps tailored according to your business-specific requirements.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is mobile animation?
Mobile platforms (iOS and Android) contain various design elements such as icons, buttons, images, drop-down lists, images, and more. A great mobile app animation feels natural to end-users and enhances the app’s user experience. User interface animations in mobile applications can give prompt feedback on users’ interactions, engage users and help them navigate easily.
2. What are the best UI animation tools?
Some of the best UI animation tools include:
• Adobe After Effects
• Framer
• Motion UI
• Lottie
• Flinto
• Origami Studio, etc.
3. How long does it take to create animation?
Normally, the average time taken to create an in-app animation of about 60-90 seconds is 6 weeks. However, the time depends largely on the type of animation you want.
Have More Questions? Feel Free to Ask Our Mobile App Experts.
