The product of a thousand small gestures (and animations)

Much to the amusement of my senior colleagues I’m mildly obsessed with a quote from Michael Eisner who was Disney CEO between 1984 -2005 at the moment:

 

“A brand is a living entity, and is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures”

It’s something that the recent internal conference season has had us driving into our teams via way of a brand alignment and our company vision message.

 

Where it has interested me most is the opportunity to infer these small gestures by considered digital user experience. It’s something that Apple has been doing for years via OSX and more recently iOS.

 

Gizmodos 13 design trends for 2013  sets out one trend ‘Animation as Affordance’. The concept is that small animations illustrate in an intuitive way how to complete a task by visually unfurling a user experience the user otherwise wouldn’t know about.

 

This from the Gizomdo article wonderfully summarises it:

That little camera icon bounces for a brilliant user
experience unfurling reason.
 

The best example I have found yet is the camera icon on the iOS lock screen. Many people unfamiliar with iOS would more than likely resort to just clicking on it instead of dragging it up. Instead of not doing anything when pressed, it does a little bounce up and down; revealing the camera feature underneath. This gives a visual hint to unknowing users as to how to properly use it in the future. By offering this hint, users are able to pick up on things rather quickly.

 

This device could be played out wonderfully throughout a website/mobile/tablet cross channel experience to encourage users down user paths they would not have otherwise considered. From a holiday maker perspective this could manifest on a smart phone based on the users location and time of day to suggest to a user to try Zumba for the first time for example.

 

The subtlety as with any tool that is using such contextually personally sensitive information such as time and location is what could make it work so well.

 

This being a digital channel different levels of animation of affordance could be implemented to establish the optimum number of alternate user path prompts.

 

Back to Michael Eisner’s quote, it’s these small gestures that cumulatively enthuse brand trust and in the end delight the user.