Smashing Magazine had an excellent article yesterday discussing the power of transitions in user experience. We’ve already discussed how some animations can make an application appear faster and more responsive, but transitions can also improve usability.
For example, consider a page that scrolls users to a portion of the page, rather than just jumping there:
The first one provides the user with way more context about where they are. It’s far less disorienting.
The whole article is useful and worth a read. I was particularly fond of the last concept that dealt with “Focus Transition.” I could see us getting a lot of use out that.
