Put simply, meaningful motion means that every single animated part of a web design should seamlessly merge with the rest of the design and consistently maintain a feeling of continuity.
Keep It Subtle: Enhance, Don’t Overpower
As it is a key part of Google’s Material Design concept, meaningful motion is here to stay. Google states that motion should provide subtle guidance to the user, feel natural and help to provide key pieces of information efficiently. Experienced design specialists, such as the team at a Drupal design agency, will intuitively understand how best to incorporate motion into a design in ways that will enhance the static features and not overpower them.
Examples of Meaningful Motion
As we have established, motion should be subtle, helpful and natural, and there are many websites and applications that have mastered the technique and have successfully and seamlessly incorporated it into their web presence.
Take the Android website, for example. The carousel on the main page flows smoothly, but there are a couple of other key features that demonstrate the web development team’s dexterity with meaningful motion design.
The motion changes direction once the user has seen the first and the last pieces of information on the carousel. This is a small change from a continuous loop, but it means that the user is quickly aware that they have seen all the information and can then choose which section to click on and browse further according to their particular interest or query.
Secondly, as a new piece of information comes into view on the carousel, the main sentence of text is animated, attracting the user’s attention and communicating a short core message. It is a subtle element, but it is one that professional design teams such as those at https://www.website-express.co.uk/service/drupal-development-agency will employ to ensure that users are aware in advance of what to expect from the following text or linked pages. This will help users to locate the information they are looking for efficiently and begin to build up a level of trust, which is important for securing those valuable conversions.
Motion is currently more prevalent within applications, but as it can also be incorporated successfully into both mobile and desktop websites, it is a good idea to consider how it can be used to enhance your website design.