Your User Interface (UI)  is everything that makes up the look, feel, and flow of your website. If your website isn’t converting customers, adding simple animation could do the trick.

Simple is the keyword. The right animation fosters a great aesthetic, while subtly enhancing the natural design and flow of your existing User Experience (UX).

They keep things moving without detracting from your content.

If someone taps, swipes or clicks something while using your website or app, they expect something to happen.

UI animation counts on this and makes your website easier to understand.

It gives customers visual clues that their actions on a website lead to results. That keeps them engaged with your content. And that happy place—where engagement meets interaction—is where conversions happen.

Insights on User Interface Animation

BUTTONS

Buttons are one of the most fundamental UI design elements. We use them countless times daily without thinking. When using a button on your website, you could either:

• Use text to show what will happen if they tap or click that button [See showtimes, read reviews, etc.].
• Animate the button itself to show the completion of the action. [The button turns into a progress bar that fills as apps download, then reveals text to alert the user when the download is complete.

As you might guess, both are useful in myriad situations. The key is picking the most intuitive design for the button’s intended action.

CARDS

Cards are a way to highlight important bits of content and encourage your users to interact by clicking them to read more.

When using UI animation to enhance Cards, I love when a card fills the screen as it’s clicked. This shows the user they have emphasized that content, without taking them to a detail screen.

The animation is a vehicle that brings together the site user, the design element, and the content itself for a more cohesive experience.

CASCADE EFFECT

Let’s say you own a restaurant and that clicking or tapping “Order Now” reveals a list of other clickable content corresponding to the types of food on your menu (appetizers, entrees, desserts, and so on). Without a cascading effect, the whole list would appear after tapping the Order Now button. With cascading, there is a slight delay between cards on the menu screen. That delay makes it easier for your customers to process the variety you have to offer and highlights each menu group as it’s revealed.

MENUS

When a user taps a button to bring up a menu, you can feature animation that either appears based on the orientation of the button or grows from the button itself to fill the screen. Just like other effects I’ve mentioned, I prefer when an animation puts more focus on the user’s selected content by having that content grow and expand.

PUSH EFFECT

When someone taps on a content card, it expands and pushes other elements out of the way so that the content the user is most interested in is now front and center. It’s more than just moving things around, it’s responding to the implied goal of the user: to see more of what they clicked on, and less of what’s around it.

TABS

Tabs are a useful way to tease additional content without overcrowding your page. We use User interface animation to improve the functionality of tabs by:

• Fading the content on one tab out when the next one is clicked.
• Sliding the content itself to match the orientation of the tab.

Because it mimics the swipe motion used to activate the tab, I prefer the second approach.

The fanciest webs design in the world— and the perfect content on that website—don’t mean a thing if they don’t motivate people to stay engaged and take action. That’s where user interface animation comes in. Done right, it highlights, underlines, and emphasizes the most important parts of your website, and makes taking action effortless and interesting to the user.

If you need more conversions, you’ve got a decision to make: keep things static, or get moving toward a better interface, and a more cohesive user experience.