At 07:08 AM 11/25/98 , Matt Pearcey wrote:

>I concur with this one. Needless animation moves the screen into an
>'interruptive' medium, rather than an interactive medium - screen-based
>artifacts all screaming 'click me!' merely because they are there, and
>moving. Essentially, this tends to draw the user away from their task at
>hand.

also, some people will cover the animation w/ their hand in order to focus
on the rest of the page. i'm sure marketing would not be thrilled by the
idea that their branding is getting hidden because of an animation.

>I'm not sure that I agree with Coneti in that an animated logo represents
>"affordance that u could reach home from here" - the affordance is
>contrived; without the learned behavior of the artifact, at best it only
>affords the click - animation for it's own goal reveals nothing about the
>function of that artifact.
>
>The example of web browser animation itself does not afford 'take me to the
>home page' - a great proportion of users we have studied use this _only_ as
>an indicator that some transfer (or browser-centric) action is taking
>place.

i totally agree. i've been using the web extensively for the past 5 years
and i didn't know until this email that you could click on the logo to take
you home. i always assumed it was just a transfer-indicator.

brig


--------------------------
brigitte eaton
http://www.eatonweb.com