The Power of Motion Design to Capture Your Audience’s Attention & Guide Them on Their Journey ✌

Motion design has a very important role to play in the successful engagement of your website visitors, and your overall marketing efforts. Elevating a user's experience is important now, more than ever, in this competitive landscape.

The human eye naturally seeks out movement

Why? As humans, we are designed to capture sudden movements as a way to protect ourselves from predators. Yes, it’s based on survival! Directional motion triggers emotions in the human brain, creating a sense of urgency, comfort or relief. These emotions can be harnessed to create an engaging experience and is highly reliant on the way motion is applied and designed.

Applied correctly, motion design can guide and nurture users, resulting in an immersive and game-changing experience. However, applied incorrectly, it can leave your audience wanting to run for the hills!

Motion design is not a new “thing”. It has been around for a number of years. However, it can get put towards the end of the priority list when creating a project, as it can be classified as an optional extra, not essential to the project.

Motion design deserves a seat at your brand guidelines party

Defining the style of motion to be applied to your brand is key. For example, ‘fun and fast’ or ‘luxurious and slow’. And maintaining consistency is always essential in a successful brand presence.

Motion applied through thoughtful speed, duration and hierarchy can demonstrate:

• the importance of messaging and/or elements
• the personality of your brand and its values
• persuading users to take action: buy, call, donate, read more, sign up and more
• direct and guide e.g. where more information can be found
• a sequence of actions e.g. what's going to happen next
  
  

Jarring, distracting, interruptive motion = no thanks

Instead, motion should gently guide users in a subtle, effortless, yet powerful way. Motion that clashes with a user’s intent gives a sense of chaos and causes frustration and a higher bounce rate is undoubtedly the result.

How can we apply this? The opportunities are endless! Some ways to incorporate motion design include:

• kinetic typography - using motion with text
• videos
• hover effects
• animation of elements
• page transitions
  
  

How do we know motion design is effective?

Let these subtle examples speak for themselves:

Page builds - present your brand, message and call-to-action with purpose

Social media - Increase engagement with video

Iconography animation - elevate the experience

Kinetic typography - using motion with text

Motion has a huge role to play in the successful engagement of your users’ interactions with your brand, through your website and marketing efforts. Motion should not be applied just for motion’s sake. It should always have a purpose, be thoughtful and be confident in its effectiveness to deliver results!

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