Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook

5.2 Motion Paths

smoothly animating movement emphasizes the feeling of interaction

In Chapter 5.1, you probably noticed that the cursor, which was embedded in each frame, jumps from one position to another as the frames are played as a slide show. This breaks the viewers’ feeling that they are ‘watching’ someone interact with the system. We will fix this by animating the cursor in each frame using the motion paths facility found in most slideware presentation software (such as Microsoft PowerPoint) or animation systems (such as Adobe Flash). Apple’s Keynote calls these move actions. As our example, let’s look at just frames 2 and 3 from the equipment rental sequence introduced in Chapter 5.1. Our goal is to animate the cursor so it moves smoothly ...