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Flex Article
Designing for Flex – Part 6: Guiding with motion
Rob Adams
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Motion in other media
- The physical world and applications
- Transitions and effects
- Transitions–motion that teaches
- Effects–motion that emphasizes
Motion has been a key element of Adobe Flash since its very beginning. The ability to animate objects on the web is integral to the technology and was originally one of its main selling points. As discussed in Designing for Flex – Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex, Flash originally used its animation capabilities to tell stories, whether to teach, to sell, or to entertain. But with Flex, the Flash platform has moved into application design, bringing all the communicative power of its motion technology with it.
Unfortunately, due to some high-profile mistakes, motion has received something of a bad reputation in application design and development circles. I say "unfortunately" because, when used properly, motion can be a powerful tool for making applications more useful, usable, and desirable. Using motion, you can eliminate the jerky jumps from screen to screen that disturb and deeply disorient users. However, improper use of motion will distract and annoy users, impeding them from reaching their goals.
This chapter covers:
- The differences between motion design in Flex applications and motion design in other media.
- How to use motion to leverage users' instinctual understanding of the physical world to enhance your application's usability.
- How to use screen to screen transitions to help guide users to the next area of interest and make it clear how to return.
- How to use motion effects to provide feedback and focus your users' attention.
The Designing for Flex series includes the following articles:
- Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex
- Part 2: Planning your application
- Part 3: Structuring your application
- Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop
- Part 5: Designing content displays
- Part 6: Guiding with motion
- Part 7: Making your application fast
- Part 8: Making your application safe
- Appendix A: List of best practices
- Appendix B: For further reading
I suggest that you read the previous parts before proceeding with this part of the series.
Download all parts of the FIG series as PDF files that you can print and read offline: adobe_flex_interface_guide.zip (ZIP, 5.7MB)
This content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
About the author
Rob Adams works for Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He started at Macromedia, Inc. in 2004 and has worked on the Flash authoring tool, Flash Player, and Fireworks, but nowadays works primarily on the Flex product line. He is involved with the design of the core framework itself as well as the designer/developer tools such as Flex Builder and Creative Suite. Although his primary focus is on design research, he also does some design work, promotes sound design practices both within Adobe and without, and makes himself a general pain in the necks of the designers, product managers, and engineers he works with.
