A fun way to think about animations is to consider them the spice of the web. These key ingredients of engaging and beautiful websites have been essential to our digital lives ever since the advent of Flash in 1996.
Much like the cracked pepper in your spice rack, the right amount of animations can make or break an online experience. Too many animations on a web page can overload a user; too few, and it will lack excitement or any sense of vitality.
One of the most practical ways to achieve the happy medium of web animation density on a website is to deploy micro-animations.
In this post, we’ll describe what micro-animations are, how they can be elegantly worked into your designs, and how to easily create them using a professional
website builder platform like Duda.
Micro-animations are the subtle bits of movement that are triggered through interactions with a web page and help guide a user through their experience.
To understand how micro-animations became a mainstay of modern web design, it helps to understand a little history.
According to a 2018
article on the history of web animations by Co-Founder of
Fluently Milber Ferreira, “After Flash’s death, the internet became once again a static place, non-animated, or semi-animated with GIFs, until CSS, and specifically until CSS3 was introduced. So, if the GIF was the first version of web animation, this was followed by the second version called Flash, and this was followed by CSS3 as the third version, but JavaScript has increasingly become the technology of choice over the last few years, especially for achieving large and complex web animations called sequences. It’s worth mentioning that the introduction of HTML5 has also helped improve how web animation is done today.”
It is during the third wave of animations described by Ferreira above that micro-animations spread rapidly across the web. Today, they are a critical and expected (if under-appreciated) element of any professional website or app.
Micro-animations can manifest in a variety of forms, including:
Need to website builder that allows you to create micro-animations quickly and easily? Start your Duda free trial now!
Micro-animations have a two-fold purpose on the websites you create.
Firstly, micro-animations add a spark of life to your design. The human eye is attracted to movement and this is what makes animation such a valuable web design tool. However, it’s easy to overload a user movement and send them fleeing from your web page. Subtle micro-animations are a great way of holding a user’s attention without over-stimulating them.
Secondly, micro-animations help guide a website visitor through their online experience as they navigate the site, engage with its content and interact with your calls-to-action. (CTAs)
Let’s look at an example of how this works in practice using Duda’s own homepage.
Duda primarily serves three types of digital professionals: agencies, SaaS platforms and hosts.
On our homepage, we allow these users to identify who they are and click through to sub-pages that contain more specific information about how Duda can help them provide beautiful websites to their customers.
When a user scrolls to the above portion of the homepage, they are presented with three flat images and a small amount of text. These are, in fact, clickable and can be used to navigate deeper into Duda’s website.
But how would a site visitor know this? Well, at first glance, they wouldn’t. However, when the user mouses over each image, a subtle movement indicates that they are most likely clickable.
It’s the application of various micro-animations like this across Duda’s homepage and website that helps us keep potential customers engaged and direct them toward the information they need.
It should be noted that despite the fact that the above reasons to use micro-animations are listed in sequential order, neither could be called their primary purpose. They are equally important.
Micro-animations for the web can be created in a variety of ways using the same technologies as other animations — namely, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5. However, if you don’t feel like going through the hard work of hand-coding, you can easily create them using a professional website builder platform like Duda.
For example, let’s look at how you can easily add entrance and scroll animations to websites built in Duda.
Accessible directly from the widget design editor, entrance animations are triggered when the site loads. Scroll animations are triggered when the animated area enters a user’s viewport .
Duda’s animation customization controls allow you to set:
These controls give you virtually limitless opportunities to add interesting micro-animations to your sites.
To get a feel for how these animation controls work in practice, here's an example of how to animate columns so they appear in a user’s viewport in a sequential order.
According to Duda Product Manager and Designer Maayan Mor, there are a few key things you want to remember anytime you add animations of any kind to a website.
Best practices for micro-animations include:
Micro-animations are, and will remain, a key part of any engaging online experience. The ways in which they can be deployed to liven up a website and aid users in navigation are almost limitless. And thanks to professional web design platforms like Duda, creating micro-animations is much easier today than it ever has been before.
Just be sure to use micro-animations judiciously in your designs. The last thing you want to do is turn off site visitors with a hurricane of movement on a single web page. Bear that in mind, and micro-animations just may be your new best friend.
