Find: applying animation principles to mobile UI design

We spoke about the temp of animation and ui in class. 

The illusion of life: applying animation principles to mobile UI design

In 1981, Disney animators introduced the world to the 12 basic principles of animation. For many, the 12 rules are held in the same esteem as Dieter Rams' ten principles of good design, and are seen as something of a bible to would-be animators. In a chapter in her book, The Mobile Frontier, Rachel Hinman looks at how the Disney principles can also be applied to mobile UI and game design, pulling in examples from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palm, and more. Hinman believes that motion is all-important in mobile design, and highlights how transitive animations and other techniques can help bring a little "magic" into a mobile user experience. The full chapter has been published online by Smashing Magazine, while the book itself is available.

Find: applying animation principles to mobile UI design

Spotted: Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

In other settings, visual complexity is more aesthetic, not less. 

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Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research
I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?
We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.
In our study we investigated how users' first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:

1. Visual complexity -- how complex the visual design of a website looks 

Prototypicality -- how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites

We presented screenshots of existing websites that varied in both of these factors -- visual complexity and prototypicality -- and asked users to rate their beauty.

The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short timeframes between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.
And these two factors are interrelated: if the visual complexity of a website is high, users perceive it as less beautiful, even if the design is familiar. And if the design is unfamiliar -- i.e., the site has low prototypicality -- users judge it as uglier, even if it’s simple.

In other words, users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). That means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations.