Designing Motion: Smart Transitions in UI Design

Adrian Zumbrunnen, a user experience and interaction designer from Zurich, gave this talk at UX Salon in 2015. It looks at transitions, animations and motion within the user interface, and how they can improve the overall user experience, tell a subtle story about a product and sometimes make an interaction more intuitive and easier to use.

His argument is that we can no longer treat user interfaces as static designs and add the interaction later. Instead, designers need to embrace the interactive nature of the web from the start and treat motion as a natural part of it. The presentation examines why motion matters so much in contemporary interface design and how it can be used to create more immersive web and mobile experiences that are both easier to understand and more delightful to use.

Patterns such as morphing controls and input feedback show the same principle in practice: movement that explains a change of state.