If you’re familiar with user experience (UX) design, then you understand the benefit of user research. It helps you empathize with users, evaluate usability, and determine the user requirements of a project (Baxter, Courage, & Caine, 2015). But what if I told you user research can have another application that can be just as vital to the outcome of a project as user empathy?
Having completed my journey through Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics with advice on how to network and market your work once it's done, I decided to take on building the types of content that sparked my exploration into animation in the first place. See and learn how I built a branded social media PSA on voting and a series of accompanying GIF stickers using the full spectrum of Blazer's book, research examples of advanced and interesting animation techniques, and my experience from my past 6 posts on motion design.
Animating user interfaces can help users and offer them a better experience, but in doing so these animated elements are made to feel so natural that we often don't consider that they can be complex to design well. For this post, I've taken the general advice from Liz Blazer's Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics and applied it to UI animation. Combined with research examples, I was able to create a looping sequence of UI animations for my previously developed Milford Resident App prototype.
