07-19-11

Animation in UX: Breathe Life Into It

“Believability. That is what we were striving for … belief in the life of the characters. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word ‘animation’: to invoke life.” Chuck Jones, describing animation at Warner Brothers via The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates

In case you haven’t been around the Madness that long, I’m relatively obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. Yes, ever since I was a wee lad-dess and worked on my thesis of believability in internet interfaces back in 2003, I’ve been obsessed. And my obsession mainly focuses around the inner workings of Carnegie Mellon and their Oz Project and their Center for Entertainment Computing. Swooooon. I remember my first conference there and the boy with the ping pong balls glued all over him. “Motion tracking” they gleamed with a big toothy grin and a thumbs up. My girl parts melted. I was in love. Technophilia at its finest.

So I find myself, from time to time lost among the archives of the Oz Project, and video game design theory and the psychology of film… and fiction writing. And that is the point of this, because while we are busy chasing our tails about things like responsive design and user testing there are industries out there that are light years ahead of ours. Not because they are older and wiser, but because they embraced the human element. They have embraced the art and the magic and the charms of their medium. While we are still stuck on numbers and platforms, they are weaving mystical amazing experiences and winning the hearts and minds of all.

Why is this? Why are we so different? Is it that we started out with Front Page and that they started out with canons? What are we missing? What are we doing wrong? Are we so caught up in the delivery that we miss the true meaning of the platform? As The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates discusses, we’re not constructing believable interfaces, amazing stories, awe inspiring fairy tales. We’re still just building navigations and links and informative hypertext. We’re not embracing the quirks of the medium.

Their reaction appear consistent with what Chuck Jones, famous for his success animating Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters, says was his key insight into animation. As an eight year old he had a cat named Johnson who liked to eat grapefruit and then wear the eaten rind on his head. Jones says he discovered that it is the oddity, the quirk, that gives personality to a character, and it is personality that gives life. If so, our architectures must support quirks, and this may mean they need to allow regularities, such as are expressed in abstraction barriers, to be broken.

Where are the grapefruit eating helmet cats of our industry?