The competition for attention online is more challenging than ever. To stay relevant in your respective industry, you must create highly engaging pages that keep users entertained. One of the easiest, most cost-effective, and practical ways of doing so is using Lottie animations.
In this post, we will cover why Lottie is the best way to use animation online and provide some real-world case studies showing you how to implement them in your designs. After reading, you’ll understand why Lottie is a superior animation file format and know how to utilize the revolutionary new technology.
Lottie Animation Use Cases
We’ve covered why you should use Lottie animations, so let’s discuss how. Below we’ll show you situations where premium Lottie animations can add value to your designs.
Onboarding Apps
The onboarding process has been increasingly digitalized over the past decade. Including animations within your step-by-step instructions helps new employees understand tasks.
Focusing the design around an animated illustration keeps users engaged and makes the process more enjoyable.
Presentations
Utilizing animation in a presentation can help you emphasize critical points. Subtle movements naturally attract the eye keeping viewers engaged and focused on the areas with the most importance.
Website Interactions
Lottie animations can be used in countless instances on websites, from your homepage hero to subscribe forms to calls to action. Adding motion to these critical parts of web pages to increase user interactivity or incentivize engagement.
Services Section
Animations work incredibly well on pages that describe a business’s services. For example, if you have a marketing agency, you can use the following animated icons to help define your areas of expertise:
SEO
Web Design
Social Media Management
If you want a more detailed description of your services, you can use illustrations to incentivize users:
SEO
Web Design
Social Media Management
Email Form
Capturing consumer data is an essential part of eCommerce. Email forms in pop-up windows, on your homepage, or blog pages are more effective when you include subtle animations.
Headers, Footers, and Dropdown Menus
Lottie animations can also add excitement to the universal components of your website. Simple animated icons are an excellent way to attract users to links in your header and footer sections. You can set the triggers to loop on hover, so the animation isn’t overwhelming on global web page components. Drop-down menus are another great place to add motion, especially when you need to incentivize clicks.
Animated illustrations in your footer work extremely well to add uniqueness to the base of your website. The animation will strengthen your branding and incentivize users to browse your links once they’ve hit the bottom of the page.
Hero Animation
Many web designers avoid large animations at the top of a home page because it can bog down page load speeds. Thankfully, Lottie offers a new solution to website animations that can be added as the design centerpiece without damaging your user experience.
Another challenge with including an animation as your hero is you’ll need a consistent design style for other pages and sections. To keep your website cohesive, use a Lottie library that offers design collections rather than one-off animations, so you won’t have to pay the graphic designer for more artwork.
Why Lottie is the Future of Web Animations
Including subtle animations on your web pages will lower bounce rates, increase visit times, and boost conversions; however, traditional file formats can bog down your page load speeds, creating a poor user experience.
In the past, we’ve had to sacrifice design choices for page load speeds. But thanks to Lottie, we can implement animation without worrying about decreasing UX metrics. Below, we discuss why Lottie is a more practical choice than other animation file formats.
Size
Lottie is exponentially smaller than GIF and MP4 files because the content is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The files consist of lines of code rather than multiple images made of pixels looped together, making them minuscule in comparison.
Here is an example of a Lottie icon:
The design above is 6,255 bytes. The same design packaged in a GIF file below is 104,761 bytes.
The MP4 file below is 77,815 bytes.
Furthermore, if you scale up the dimensions of the GIF or MP4 file, the total file size will increase.
Customizability
Working with JSON-based files has more benefits than just file size and decreasing the load on your server. The animations can be easily manipulated after they have been produced. For example, you can change the colors, speed, delay, and trigger from the design platform or directly in the code. This is possible because you are just making changes in JavaScript instead of other formats where you’d have to alter the source file with design software.
No Pixilation
When you increase the dimensions of a GIF or MP4 animation, the entire file size increases substantially. In addition, the quality degrades because you are essentially stretching out the images. The same concept applies when you decrease the size; shrinking the dimensions push the pixels closer together and lower the quality.
Pixilation happens because GIF and MP4 files comprise thousands of pixels. The pixels are fixed and won’t adjust when the dimensions are changed to keep the quality intact.
When you increase or decrease the size of a Lottie animation, the file size, and the quality remain the same. Lottie animations are vector-based, meaning the lines and shapes are made with dynamic equations that will adjust when scaled up or reduced in size.
Responsive Designs
Lottie is a far better choice for a mobile-first approach to web design. Vector animations are responsive to different screen sizes because they can change dimensions without losing quality.
Implementing Lottie into Your Designs
While Lottie is a relatively new technology, most CMS platforms already have built-in tools or plugins that will accommodate JSON files.
We provide step-by-step instructions on how to add Lottie animations with popular web design tools in our blog. Our tutorials cover platforms from React to Wix, so we have you covered regardless of how you build webpages.
Final Words
Lottie is a superior way to handle web animations because of its lightweight file size, easy customization capabilities, and vector-based graphics. If you are ready to implement Lottie animations in your designs, try Creattie for free. The library features an extensive selection of Lottie illustrations and icons in industry-specific cohesive collections.
