Understanding the Effect of Animation and its Speed on User Enjoyment

Providing the user with good user experience is complex and involves multiple factors. One of the factors that can impact the user experience is animation. Animation can be tricky to get right and needs to be understood by designers. Animations that are too fast might not accomplish anything and having them too slow could slow the user down causing them to get frustrated.

This study explores the subject of animation and its speed by trying to answer the following questions – 1) Do people notice whether an animation is present 2) Does animation affect the enjoyment of a transition? and 3) If animation does affect enjoyment, what is the effect of different animation speeds?

The study was conducted using 3 prototypes of an application to order bottled water in which the transitions between different brands of bottled water were animated at 0ms, 300ms and 650ms. A survey was conducted to see if the participants were able to spot any difference between the prototypes and if they did, which one they preferred.

It was found that most people did not recognize any difference between the prototypes. Even people who recognized a difference between the prototypes did not have any preference of speed.