CAN UI ANIMATIONS INCREASE SALES?
Sounds crazy, right? But they absolutely can when used in key moments throughout an experience. Not only do they create a more memorable and delightful experience, they move users further along in the funnel. Leading to higher click through rates and increased sales.
I collaborated with the team at DesignMap to audit the current eBay China website and apps focusing on areas of the shopping experience where animations could add the most value.
The three main goals of the project were to:
My UI motion design process helps clients build more intuitive, beautiful and profitable software products.
A comprehensive audit of the UI is done to identify areas of user experience where animation could add the most value. Hundreds of screenshots and short videos were shared with the team at eBay to find areas of the user interface where animation could add value.
A filtered list of have been identified user flows we create animations using After Effects, CSS/JS or Invision. This is where a brands motion style and personality begins to take shape.
Create polished animations of the individual design components. With a strong focus on feasibility and performance.
Build the component in functional code. The language depends upon the product. Sometimes it's Javascript (web app) or CSS or both. Other times I'll deliver Objective-C or Swift code.
Where can animations add the most value?
Which parts of the UI are confusing? Are users abandoning their shopping cart? Could transitions between screens be made less jarring? A comprehensive audit of the UI was done to identify potential areas where animation could add the most value.
The animations had to align with both product, brand and business goals. Next step; determine a user flow to focus on.
When doing UI animation, it's really important to see the animations in the context of the UI. The more 'real' the animation seems the easier it will be to get buy in from the team on whether the animation feels right or not.
15+ UI flows and components were animated to flush out ideas for eBay and narrow in on final overall motion styles and components.
By constraining ourselves to a limited color palette we were able to create a systematic decibel level for a system of animations. Loud animations, i.e. items on the page we were trying to draw the users attention to, use 3 colors. Secondary UI animations use only one color.
The use of quick bursts of color extended the eBay brand slogan of "Fill Your Cart with Color" and gave developers a systematic approach to applying animations which are on brand and simple to implement.
Ooooh fancy animations...so what?
I like your skepticism :) All the animations were designed from an engineers perspective. Delivered to eBay as functional, highly performant React + CSS components. Copy, paste, deploy and track.
The engineering team at eBay uses ReactJS for their web app. For performance reasons all the animations were built using pure CSS. I delivered 11 React based components in a standalone Storybook app with documentation and motion specs.
Below is sample code for the Price Drop Component delivered to the eBay team
Higher click through rate when compared to components without an animated CTA or microinteraction.
For eBay China that translated to roughly 500,000 more engaged users!
Detailed Motion principles and guidelines were delivered to give the design and engineering team a framework for incorporating motion into the UI.
after delivering a working component to eBay's engineers they had it implemented and deployed to a staging site. Ready to be A/B tested.
