A Fancy Animation May Not Deliver a Great User Experience

A coder has created an animation that functions as a simple transition with Highway.js. This person wanted to query other programmers in order to see what they thought about it and whether or not they would use something like this in their site designs. The function is a simple animation that transitions from one page to another without the user having to click on anything.

By far, the most common comments left by the people who viewed this five-second animation was that they felt like it slowed down the loading of the page. Slow loading times are a common frustration among users in the mobile environment. They also felt like the slow loading time could turn people off of the site. Even if the page loads in the same amount of time, the animated bar at the center of the page made people think that it was loading more slowly. Just the perception of a slow loading time would make people turn away.

Additional people felt like this animation was not necessary. This group of programmers falls under the "KISS" or "keep it simple, stupid" line of thought when it comes to creating a website and the effects on the pages. One person suggested keeping any animated effects that are just for show to 200 milliseconds or shorter. Anything longer would result in an poor user experience, suggested this coder.

Some people wondered what the browser support would be for this Highway.js animation. Different browser versions and the mobile browsers all have different support for animated effects. The developer reported that current versions of Chrome, Bing, IE, Firefox, Edge and Safari support this type of animated effect. People did note that Microsoft no longer supports any version of IE.

A few people had suggestions on how to change the animation. Some suggested getting rid of the sliding effect. Others wanted the bar to be thinner. Some wanted it to either start in the middle and move to the right or move at a faster rate of speed when moving from the left side of the screen to its right side. For more information click here https://v.redd.it/3gp1pp5rrap21.