Measuring the Value of Motion
Quantifying the Impact of Motion Design on User Experience
“.. We can’t cut it, it brings subconscious delight!” the designer screams in the sprint planning meeting, fighting tooth and nail for the meticulously-crafted micro-interaction they have spent the last few days perfecting. Eyes roll around the room as product managers and engineers balk at the idea of committing extra work hours implementing the motion design.
If you’ve aspired towards getting motion design into your products, you’ve no doubt encountered a similar experience to the designer above. The cross-functional panel in these sprint planning meetings lives in a world of numbers and metrics, dollars and cents, not esoteric “delight.” Lacking the numbers that would resonate with this audience to justify why your company should invest in motion design, you flounder. Your design, and its beautifully-intuitive micro-interactions, is relegated to pretty pixels on your Dribbble account.
What if you had some numbers to describe the impact of your work? What if you could prove to your stakeholders that they should, in fact, invest in implementing motion design? Read on to discover the findings from our +1,000 user research study on the impact of motion design on user perception, and how we at VMware have used data to drive our product teams towards its inclusion.
Findings Teaser: Motion design can speed up perceived performance by up to 1 second, representing an improvement of up to 17.4% over a standard loading spinner.
Problem
There are many lenses from which to measure the value of motion—functional, practical, etc—in this study we chose to measure the impact on user perception. To understand this problem, we thought about how we could measure the impact of motion design on a common interaction: logging in.
Other studies have sought to tackle this problem from different lenses; we at VMware Design are looking to target motion design overall, whereas prior research focused on the impact of a particular UI component: skeleton views. Our study, in contrast, tested different degrees of motion design, with skeleton views being one measure in the spectrum.
Hypothesis: With increasing degrees of motion design, study participants would perceive the interface to be more performant: faster and more responsive.
Study
We knew we wanted to prove some impact in both a general sense and one that is relevant to our products. To this end, we collected a statistically-significant data sample and some brief demographic data from our test participants. We could leverage that data in our findings later towards improving VMware products serving those customers’ demographics.
I created an interactive prototype connected to a database. Test participants were sent a link; clicking it took them to a Framer prototype hosted on a live site that randomly alternated between the different types of loading experiences — from no motion to more motion design—and different time intervals. The participant then went through a workflow and answered questions afterwards, then their answers were saved to a Firebase database.
Findings
After capturing over a thousand responses, our amazing former Head of User Research Leo Yeykelis and stellar designer Janani Subhashini Umamaheswaran helped analyze the data. In 5 out of 6 of the loading time intervals, loading experiences leveraging some degree of motion design—those with a motion transition & skeleton loader and those with a skeleton loader only—were perceived to be more performant. Further, the variation representing the highest degree of motion design—the motion transition & skeleton loader experience — was perceived to be most performant in half of the loading time intervals (3, 8, and 9 seconds).
As illustrated in the table below, motion design can speed up perceived performance by up to 1 second, representing an improvement of up to 17.4% over a standard spinner.
Implications
In our technology-dependent world, performance is paramount. Users have ever greater demands that applications deliver information in a timely manner. A Gomez study from 2010 found that “an increase in page response time from 2 to 10 seconds increased page abandonment rates by 38%.” The user’s perception of application performance, therefore, is critical to ensuring both customer happiness, retention, and the business’ bottom line.
Using this knowledge, one can make the argument that investing in motion design can drive business metrics forward. For us at VMware, we noticed that our cloud products typically load in about 5 seconds. If—by implementing a motion design solution—our 5 second loading time is perceived to be loaded in 4 seconds, we can make the argument that implementing it will increase user satisfaction and save the business the revenue points it loses with longer page loading times.
Conclusion
Many will agree that motion design improves user experience in subtle, subconscious, intangible ways. The subtle “no” back-and-forth shake when a password is entered incorrectly, for example, instantly communicates a password has failed validation. Rather than requiring the user to read an error message, therefore, the interface is communicating to the user in terms they subconsciously resonate with.
Quantifying these subconscious impacts, though, can be challenging, making it difficult to argue for its implementation in business settings. We hope our research has provided you fodder for those settings, giving you some hard metrics to make a more convincing argument than “it brings delight.” Follow me to stay up-to-date as we at VMware tackle the next area to study in the area of motion design: its impact on engagement.
Special thanks to Janani Subhashini Umamaheswaran and Leo Yeykelis for assisting with this study. Drop a line below with any comments and thoughts, thank you!
