I dislike revile animation-for-the-sake-of-it on websites where panel after panel, or even individual paragraphs of text (universe have mercy) flies in, or elements like images, tables etc, show up with some kind of snazzy effect, after a delay, as one scrolls down.
A place in hell is reserved for annoying designers who think that this is a Good Thing™.
The prime reason for this is that technology tools like Wordpress / Wix and other website builders have democratized the craft of building websites, but they obviously cannot gift the art to anyone. People who use these tools fancy themselves to be designers, and think they know the art just because the tool enables the craft. Nothing can be further from the truth. Every creative work (even product design) has an art and a craft to it. The art has to come from formal training or acquired formal knowledge and then experience.
As if that was not enough, a special in hell is reserved for people who use animated gifs in long form content, which is the pits. And its even worse when the entire post is littered with these large animated gifs, which is then followed by small pieces of text.
Why is using animated gifs in long form content a bad thing? Lets explore.
But first, let's hear what AI Boi has to say:
Ah well, that's surprisingly pithy. Well done AI Boi.
So, what is long form content?
In the context of online media - long-form content is articles, blog posts, stories, news reports, whitepapers etc typically consisting of a large word count or duration. Its meant to engage readers with comprehensive information.
By its very nature, long form content must be more than a couple of paragraphs - it has to be substantial in length, say at least 250 words, and of sufficient depth of subject matter. A certain amount of time and effort is required to write a long form content well, and having published one - the creator expects that the audience will take their time to read, digest, appreciate and engage with the content.
I would also argue that long form content body follows a certain format that is well recognized and known by all - its made up of headings, followed by text, supported by infographics, or images where required. It may also be supported by the rich embeds - charts, media etc.
Animated gifs bring nothing to the game and contribute nothing to elevate the attractiveness of the content. Conversely, animated gifs are a needless distraction that takes away from enjoying the long form content.
There is no place for animated gifs in long form content.
AI Boi says:
Human psychology at work
Motion is distracting
The human eye is extremely receptive to motion detection, anything that is moving captures attention. This is of course evolutionary from the days of searching for prey when hunting, but it also means that too many moving elements on a page take away attention from everything else. In the context of large animated gifs on long form content - the eye immediate goes to what's moving (ie the animated gif), leaving little time for anything else.
Too long; didn't read
Then lets consider that we live in an age of too much content and hence most people suffer from soft attention deficiency syndrome. Couple this with the fact that humans don't actually read everything on a page - mostly people are glancing through - in the end all people have done is scrolled thru the page, with the eye briefly halting on the animated gifs and bounced off.
Working memory and cognitive load
The human brain has a limited working memory - a cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates information to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. You are using it right now to read and digest what I've written. The capacity of working memory is limited, and it can be easily overwhelmed, especially when multiple tasks or pieces of information are presented simultaneously. Therefore it is imperative to reduce the cognitive load.
Given these 3 factors - (1) motion is distracting, (2) people don't have much attention span and (3) are limited by how much info they can grasp at one shot - long form creators need to ask themselves the hard question:
Did my audience even get my message, or were they lost in the shiny?
Everything is not social media
AI Boi says:
One must understand the medium when writing long form content - its not meant for doom scrolling and quick glance through. The format has to support the intent of the medium. The format of long form content is easily recognizable - when one opens a long post, we rely on our mental model of long form content and are thus prepared to spend a little longer time and a little more attention on the post because we relish the idea of consuming information at a deeper level of engagement than social media with its transitory content.
When posts are littered with animated gifs, they are sublimely signaling to the audience that
- this content is transitory, so minimum effort and attention should be spent on it
- its just the ho-hum usual, social media kind of content and the audience can treat it the same way
In other words, no effort needs to be made to read, digest, appreciate and engage with the content.
Long form creators need to ask themselves the hard question:
Did my audience even do justice to the content that I created with so much effort?
Supported by standards and real research
Least one thinks that I'm making these up, let me buttress my case by referring the primary web standard that governs this, as well as salient discussions from other places, as well as studies and research. One would be surprised by how much animated gifs are hated by people, yes hated, irrespective of the rubbish passed around by articles like this GIF for Blogs - Add Motion to your Text (hint - its written by the company which sells animated graphics)
The governing standard: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Guideline 2.3 Seizures and Physical Reactions
Do not design content in a way that is known to cause seizures or physical reactions. Motion animation triggered by interaction can be disabled, unless the animation is essential to the functionality or the information being conveyed.
The impact of animation on people with vestibular disorders can be quite severe. Triggered reactions include nausea, migraine headaches, and potentially needing bed rest to recover.
From NNGroup
I rigorous digest and follow everything that comes out from the NNGroup. In their own words: We’re a team of industry leaders who have shaped the field of experience design for more than 25 years.
From the article The Role of Animation and Motion in UX
In UX, motion and animation can be helpful and communicative, if used with restraint. Motion is most often appropriate as a form of subtle feedback for microinteractions, rather than to induce delight or entertain users.
...motion in user interfaces can easily become annoying: it’s hard to stop attending to it, and, if irrelevant to the task at hand, it can substantially degrade the user experience.
From the article Animated GIFs in Email Are Worse Than Static Emails
...adding animation to an email, the positive sentiment towards that email decreases by 165%..
From the Oracle Modern Marketing Blog
From the article Recognize that Animation Can Distract
Thoughtless and frivolous uses of animated gifs can actually hurt the performance of your campaign. This happens most often when animation is added for animation’s sake, rather than used strategically to convey or support the message and to lead the recipient’s eyes to key content and calls-to-actions.
Marketers increase the danger of animation distracting when they use two or more animations close enough to each other that they’re likely to appear in the same viewing pane. Now the viewer really doesn’t know where to look, and may skip all the content in between the two animations.
