On a digital platform, actions often manifest as animations in the user interface (UI). The effective use of animations and metaphoric actions can make an application/web interface easier to understand and bring it to life. Besides orienting users to the state changes in UI, animations, when used correctly, can make the interface feel smoother, richer, natural and more engaging. They can effectively keep users abreast with state changes and object manipulations and smooth the process of such changes.
The objective of this project was to analyze the use of such animations as UI elements, chalk out a functional vocabulary of the patterns of usage to be used by designers and enlist a set of recommended practices of applying these animations to a UI.
The intent of the interactive repository I had designed was to aid the contextual discovery of dynamic behaviours used across platforms. This collection of behaviors acts as a visual clue and reference for designers who seek to communicate these for the implementation in the development phase. The repository tool allows designers to clip and compose a scheme of dynamic behaviours for an entire digital product. It also enlists a set of ‘best practices’ for a behaviour, which is socially validated by other UI practitioners.
The final deliverable was an extension of the Yahoo! UI Library, Y!Motion, an interactive, open and scalable repository of dynamic behaviours.
The project was a great learning experience, especially because it involved understanding the design process used by various user experience designers and envisaging a tool to aid their process of creation.