"The web is a pretty difficult space in which to create an expressive surface for text. It seems to me that the web is all edges and without much depth and for a writer that is trouble. You want to induce depth, to have the surface give way to reverie and a sense of a shared shaping of the experience of reading and writing. .... language finally finds its natural element in motion, not in a window but as a window, not as a single surface but as the aural, visual, and proprioceptive experience of successive surfaces. "
Chang, B.-W. and Ungar, D. "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface." in UIST'93: Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 1993. pp. 45-55.
"The experimental user interface for the programming language Self uses techniques drawn from cartoon animation to replace sudden changes with smooth transitions, offloading some of the cognitive burden of interpreting the change to the perceptual system. For example, a small object grows continuously to a large, expanded object. A menu transforms smoothly from the menu button that is clicked on to the full menu. Objects move solidly from one location to another, maintaining the illusion of solid movement even if they must cross great distances in a single frame. These and other, more subtle, applications of animation to the interface work together to make changes on the screen smooth and clear.
Bringing this kind of animation to the user interface has both cognitive and affective benefits. By offloading interpretation of changes to the perceptual system, animation allows the user to continue thinking about the task domain, with no need to shift contexts to the interface domain."
Labels: affect, expressive
