Understanding the importance of animation in human-computer interfaces and its relation to user experience

Abstract

Animation is increasingly used in multimedia user interfaces (UI). Ever more applications are including animation to improve their UI and user experience (UX). Animation seems to play a key role to develop user-friendly, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand apps that achieve a satisfactory UX. This work attempts to explain animation performance in multimedia UI and how this affects the UX. We found that: (1) animation is a key element of multimedia UI that strongly affects UX and can improve it, if applied correctly; (2) animation enhances: reduced perceived waiting time, explanatory and cognitive support, efficient feedback and increased user attention; (3) animation's major properties lie in adapting its intensity, function, time and aesthetics to the context of action. Additionally, we identified two categories of animation aspects in multimedia UI: internal aspects and external features. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the design of animated multimedia interfaces does not have a standardised methodology. Animation is incorporated ad-hoc, under the individual empirical experience of the creators, and without any a priori guarantee of usefulness or success. Therefore, our future work aims to generate an integral model where the variables related to animation in multimedia UI that modulate UX are analysed, and thus improve human-computer interfaces.