Animations can enhance the experience of using an user interface. They can an inter-
face more interesting and engaging. Animation can also serve other purposes aside from
aesthetics. Animation can communicate with the users. It can direct the attention of the user
directly into the relevant parts of the interface. Even simple loading buffer animations serve
a purpose in showing the user that the interface is still responsive and allowing the flow of
time to feel faster.
Animations can be very useful for UI designers, but it is also very easy to do animations
wrong. Overuse of them is common and leads to confusion in the users. In this work, we
present an interview study to investigate which components of animations are the ones
that have the worst negative effects in users. The computer game Hearthstone was chosen
as the interface for the study. Animations within the game were categorized and divided
into features. The interview subjects were exposed to these animations within their context
before the interview. The results revealed some of the features that confuse users the most.
Animations with multiple events occurring simultaneously are amongst the most troublesome.
Understanding which type of animation features to use sparsely will prevent designers from
misusing animations in ways that damages the user experience.

Abstract iii
Acknowledgements iv
List of Figures vi
List of Tables vii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Purpose of this work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Key concepts used in our work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Interview Study 11
2.1 Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1.1 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1.2 Interview preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.1.3 Interview procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.1 Preference for game UIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.2 Previous negative experiences with animations . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2.3 Detrimental Animation Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3 General Discussion 23
3.1 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2 Design implication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.3 General limitation and future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
References 25

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