There’s a reason that the adjective “animated” is most often used in a positive sense: it suggests excitement and inspiration, energy and motion. To be animated is to attract attention, to have something extra or beyond the ordinary. It’s to stand out.
Needless to say, businesses should be aiming to have all those qualities. You don’t need us to say that, in the online space, websites proliferate – and many fail to make their mark.
Very often, small differences between sites can have huge impacts on how well they engage their audiences. Little changes offer significant advantages.
That’s why we suggest our clients consider animation, the subtle art of making your webpages move. Simply put, a bit of motion goes a long way.
Animation Tells Stories.
Human beings can’t get enough of narratives. Animation can add the power of the movement from A to B to your site. Users will respond to a story well told – and connect with a business that offers them one.
Animation literally moves – it can direct attention to a transition from one state to another. Even a simple button animation achieves this. But, more ambitiously, a short cartoon or simple presentation can embody the concepts or values that lie behind a business – and help your audience understand them more clearly, and on a “gut” level. Gather users around the campfire, and use animation to tell them a tale.
Animation Engages Audiences.
In other words, animation grabs people – because it can add texture, interest and momentum to what might otherwise be a static webpage. As with all elements of design, it helps to know an audience: their age and interests, their likes and dislikes. Only once an audience has been profiled can they be given what they want.
Animation offers a direct and entertaining way of providing a website’s audience with information they will not only absorb but enjoy. Once grabbed in this way, an audience is far more likely to stick with a site – and convert into customers.
Animation Enhances Design.
What animation is offering your site, then, is an extra dimension – a secret weapon. Animation deployed correctly offers a whole new structure and architecture to a site, adding an edge to how it communicates both its messaging and its mechanisms. Not only does animation add interest to a page – it can direct users’ attention to key calls to action.
Animation works on more than one level, then: it communicates and directs, explains and helps users explore. It can add a layer of quirky humour as easily as it can offer the clarity of good illustration.
In short? Animation improves pages.
One of our most recent clients to benefit from the Squibble approach to web animation is the employer benefits firm Capita. Their view on the benefit of keeping things moving is simple:
So don’t take our word for it: clients, too, are sold on animation. A full presentation presents a business’s story clearly and memorably; integral animation offers sign-posting and way-finding features that will enhance how users use a site. Its benefits, then, are numerous.
At its root, though, the advantage of animation is simple: it adds colour. In a grey digital landscape full of sites that seem the same, to get animated is to jump out of the crowd. Drop us a line to talk about getting your site moving.
