When building a website, it’s a common desire to want to make it flashy. Add more animations! Attract attention!
Of course, when someone is already on your site, what are you trying to “attract”? At this point they simply need to know if you’re able to solve their problem or not, and flashiness and animations are unlikely to help with that.
If you want to add animations to your site, they should serve one of three goals:
- Impact: Make people feel the power of what you do, like a beautiful drone flyover at the top of the page.
- Focus: Movement on the page that draws the eye where you want it to go.
- Interaction: Movement to let the user know that their action was correct, like a button changing colors after you click it.
Beyond that, it’s just noise. Being clever and distinct sounds good, but it’s often a bad idea. As I shared a few years ago from Blake Howard, “it’s a mistake to sacrifice clarity on the altar of distinction“.
Keep your site calm and focused on the problem you solve. With less chaos your message becomes more clear, and that’s the best path to success for everyone.
