CSS Animations

CSS Animation: A Key Tool to Improve User Experience

Core points:

• CSS animation is a key tool to enhance the user experience. It adds depth and meaning to the interaction, guides users to browse the interface, and provides user action feedback.
• Although JavaScript also provides animation features, CSS is the easiest way to get started with animation. JavaScript-based animations can be more complex and resource-intensive, which may slow down page loading times on slower connections or mobile devices.
• CSS animations can be launched immediately with just a web browser and text editor, an easy to access and efficient way to bring the design to life. CSS animation has great potential, from smooth transition to using keyframes to creating complex effects.

Animation is rapidly becoming an indispensable web design tool, increasingly used to help users understand and interact. In recent years, browsers and mobile devices have greatly improved their support for animation. In fact, all modern desktop browsers have built-in support for CSS animations. Combined with other powerful tools provided by CSS, now is the best time to add dynamic effects to your design. But why is animation so important? How do you start using it today?

Why is CSS animation so important in our design?

Movement is an important part of our communication and understanding of the world around us. This is our innate instinct. We have evolved to be very good at noticing movement. Movement protects us by helping us notice changes in our environment, and it adds an extra layer of communication to what we say. Observing motion and visual cues allows us to understand complex behaviors and ideas in a nonverbal way. Animation on web pages can play the same role and can add extra depth and meaning to the conversation between the user and the user interface. For example, we can animate the element when it is removed and move it back to the screen when it is added. This simple operation helps us understand where they go. It adds to our psychological model of what is being processed and makes the interaction richer and more meaningful.

We can use animations to attract users' attention to certain elements of the interface, or tell stories, and guide users to operate step by step. Adding animations and transitions to microinteractions in a website or application can help attract users and bring surprises and pleasures to them. They are also a powerful way to provide users with feedback on what they are performing, such as hovering, clicking buttons, or filling in forms. All of this adds dialogue and helps add personality to the interface.

Where is JavaScript?

CSS is not the only way to add animations to our designs, but it is the easiest way to get started. From the early days of jQuery, we have had a way to use JavaScript to animation and move page elements. Recently, powerful packages like GreenSock's GSAP have brought advanced animations to browsers—even for browsers that do not support CSS animations. They provide granular control over how animations work, excellent backward compatibility, and a variety of useful features. But it does come with a price. Adding additional JavaScript dependencies to our project will make our project heavier, resulting in longer downloads and longer time it takes to process pages. This may not matter on desktops with fast broadband connections, but for many people in the world who rely on slower connections and mobile devices, we need to keep in mind performance. The introduction of JavaScript frameworks will also add additional complexity as it adds more maintenance and possible sources of errors. Nevertheless, JavaScript-based animation options have made great strides and are a powerful and useful option when we want to add advanced or complex animations. However, before we use the plugin, we can do a lot with CSS: It is the fastest and easiest way to start using animation today.

Animate with CSS

Web browsers support CSS out of the box (various degrees). Just like we use font-size or background properties to design our visual design in a style sheet, we can also use transition, animation and keyframes to create motion. Transitions can be used to smoothly change styles in hover states; keyframe animations can be set to loop through multiple states, or even combined to create complex effects. We only need to use the built-in CSS attributes to control animation time, direction, etc. After a short learning curve, even people with basic CSS skills will find it very familiar. Understanding what CSS can do helps to choose between using keyframes or using JavaScript.

Why not start today?

The advantage of CSS animation is that nothing can stop you from starting immediately. You only need a web browser and a text editor, or you can start creating immediately using a service like CodePen. There are many reasons to get excited about animate in your browser. There are many great examples of animation not only improving the aesthetics of the website, but also increasing interactivity and reducing confusion. But animation is not only a practical tool, it is also fun and creative to use them; it brings the web to life.

In addition to the theoretical and practical examples introduced in the course, there are many places to look for inspiration. I like to check out the animation concepts on Dribbble. Use Your Interface has a lot of UI inspiration, as well as Cappptivate’s iOS inspiration, or be sure to bookmark Art of the Title if you’re looking for movie inspiration. Animation can bring so much to our designs. It helps us communicate, it helps us tell stories, it can be a fun and creative outlet. Getting started is easy, but everything we can create is infinite. So why not start trying something new and see how sports bring your design to life!

Frequently Asked Questions about CSS Animation

How to make my CSS animation smoother?

To make CSS animations smoother, you can use the "animation-timing-function" property. This property specifies the speed curve of the animation, allowing you to control the speed of the animation at different points. For example, "ease-in" causes the animation to start slowly, and "ease-out" causes the animation to end slowly. You can also create your own speed curve using "cubic-bezier".

Can I use CSS animation on all web browsers?

All modern web browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge) support CSS animations. However, for older versions of Internet Explorer (IE9 and below), CSS animation is not supported. To ensure compatibility, you can use JavaScript-based fallbacks, or simply design your website for elegant downgrades on older browsers.

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