Reading response 3 Animation—How should we take advantage of it?

There are some important questions you should ask yourself before incorporating animation into the site. Here are a few of them:

• Does the animation add anything of value?
• Does it make the page/site/button easier to use?
• Does it make the purpose or meaning of the page/site/button clearer?
• Is the animation distracting? Does it draw the user's attention away from the page's actual content or the site's core message?

The important thing to remember here is that you are not your website's target audience. Just because you, your employees, or your friends think the animation is cute, funny, or technologically advanced is no guarantee that your site's visitors will think so.

Animation can be a really useful tool. It can make a website more usable, more engaging, and more effective. But like any tool, animation is only helpful when it's needed. You should only use animation when it serves a clear purpose, and even then, you should use it carefully, because too much animation is much worse than not having any at all.

Resource: Animation: Is it good for your website? Retrieve from http://www.inspire-consulting.com/resources/article.aspx?id=10

Regarding the application of animation, it seems that I have never thought carefully about these rules and relevant gentle reminders until I have the chance to review our course wiki of animation for assignment. I am always a visual person. I love animation since I was kid. Even now, if I have to make one choice, I prefer a website with the combination of texts and visual images (including animation) to the one that just full of texts without decoration---even those visual images are just for decoration purpose.

I agree that well-applied animation can improve learning skills and abilities, whereas, constantly running animations can be distracting when used excessively. In most cases, the appropriate application, in my opinion, helps us understand the content faster and more easily, while, ill-applied animation sometimes challenges our patience and makes us weary. Its application has more implications than we expected, such as the consideration of the contexts—formal or informal situations, the target users—age and gender, the purposes—for acquisition or for entertainment/ fun, the content demonstrated---academic or practical, so on and so forth.

Let’s imagine two different scenarios. Mrs. Little is now teaching her grade one students basic daily disciplines—say, how to be a polite kid when borrowing and returning other’s pencils or what is the proper behavior when playing games with other kids, etc. She prepared a relevant PPT or created a website by applying cute and funny animations that well demonstrate the proper behaviors that a polite kid should follow.

The other scenario is Dr. Vaughan is now providing a serial seminar for his PhD students. The topic is related to the bottom line of human’s morals. And, the discussion outcomes have to be recorded and prepared for a paper to be issued. Should Dr. Vaughan prepare the stuffs for the seminar with animations as Mrs. Little does in her elementary class? Obviously, not at all.  

Animation is really a fascinating tool for Kids. Kids will benefit a lot and have better learning outcomes from animations. In the first scenario, kids may be illiterate, but they are impressed by the colorful animations at the first glance, then gradually go to where the instructor desires for them.  However, if the potential users of a website/ PPT/ product are adults, along with tons of information delivered in a formal situation, animation is not a good choice unless it is helpful for the content clarification, or, even it is helpful, it should not be overused. Otherwise, it must be ignored at all. Therefore, animation is meaningless in the second scenario. Furthermore, I think males will be disgust animation more than females do in formal situations for academic purposes, as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”; males are usually more sensible than Females. In a word, “Whether or not you should use animation depends on the purpose of the animation. Or rather, it depends on whether the animation has a purpose. ”