Designing for Flex – Part 6: Guiding with motion

Motion in other media

Many designers have focused on the design of motion in the past century, mostly in the cinema and broadcast media and more recently in computer games.  Directors and cinematographers in the movie industry must deeply consider the properties of motion and its impact on the static image; cinematic experiences are much more complex than simply pointing the camera at the action. Animators, both traditional and modern CGI artists, must consider motion design at an even deeper level; they craft motion as a native medium to recreate natural movements or to purposely exaggerate physics for amusement or on-screen effect. An entire art form exists around these disciplines that can take years to master.

Figure 1. Motion design for animation and film is an art form that requires years to master. Motion design tools such as Adobe After Effects are correspondingly powerful, complex, and unapproachable to non-specialists. Fortunately, most Flex RIAs do not demand this level of motion design expertise.

Fortunately, applications are much less demanding of the motion expertise of their designers. Movies, television shows, and games all aim to weave elaborate narratives with motion that involve highly realistic, often three-dimensional objects interacting with each other in complex ways. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from visual simplicity; they aim not to tell elaborate stories but to guide users to the information or endpoints they wish to reach. Extensive or unnecessarily sophisticated use of motion may distract from this purpose. Thus, applications are not only able to get away with a simpler view of motion than movies and games, but they actively benefit from such simplicity.

In the past, many websites and applications went overboard with motion and became distracting to their intended users. Perhaps the most painful example for Flash was the old "skip intro" movies that started appearing on websites starting in the late nineties. Skip-intros were offensive primarily because they got in the user's way, preventing him from immediately accessing the content and tasks the user had come to the website for. A similar example from the desktop world is Microsoft's Clippy, who was annoying for a variety of reasons, one of which was his tendency to sit in the corner of the screen and fidget, breaking the concentration of users who were trying to work. (Note: Never play a continuously looping animation in your application, excepting soft glows or other nonintrusive effects that are too subtle to draw attention. Fortunately this terrible practice isn't nearly as prevalent as it used to be, but we must still guard against it every chance we get.)

To avoid repeating these mistakes, consider how motion affects human perception. Examining how motion impacts human behavior in the physical world can help you design effective motion in Flex applications.

Page 2 of 6

Previous Page

Next Page