Selective Animation: Packing a lot into a little room

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Selective animation, as opposed to ongoing animation, occurs when the reader does something, most commonly mousing over or clicking on an anchor. The anchor may also be triggered by a more complex set of conditions.

Tracking

Selective anchors are commonly used to show "hot links" or highlight the current anchor. Many efferent sites use a form of selective animation to indicate which anchor would be triggered if the user clicked at that point. These are often in menus (for example, PeopleSoft [53], The Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children [58], and Questacon [55]). The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection's [50] and brandchannel's [5] menus show two different methods for this--highlighting with a lighter color and turning from white with colored outlines to the actual color, respectively. Adaptive Path [1] takes this strategy one step further to illuminate faces when the reader mouses over the anchor for that staff member.

Detail giving

Selectively animated anchors can also provide more information about the current anchor's destination when moused over. Anchors in Poems That Go Archive [54], Idea Line [67], and Earthtrends [12] provide more text explanations in a specified screen area when moused over. Saturn's [60] and Garnier Fructis' [20] explanations offer more enticements than information. Efferent sites tend to use selective animation for providing more details more often than aesthetic works.

Attention getting

Some sites, both efferent and aesthetic emit sound (like Cooperstown [6] or Doonesbury [64]) to draw attention to the anchor or to provide content (like I'm Simply Saying [34).

Content typing

Web designers have very little screen space and yet want to show some complex link heirarchies. Mouseover menus and popup menus can provide an elegant way to use limited space--providing you know what category your subcategory would fall under. The majority of these anchors are mouseover menus, which can be an effective venue for displaying complex and heirarchical information (the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection [50] provides three layers of submenus). Often these mouseovers use highlights to pinpoint hotspots or the current trigger anchor. _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode [44] subverts this common expectation to infuse more meaning into highlighted sections.

Doonesbury [64]is a good creative example of using animation to show a heirarchical anchor for efferent purposes--click on one of the outer rings and you can find the subtopics. Fuddruckers [19], on the other hand presents a poor example for efferent purposes--mouse around the cheeseburger until it reveals that the cheese is the anchor that will trigger franchise information.

Content sorting

Whitney Museum of American Art's Idea Line, presents a unique and artistic approach to sorting and categorizing chronological information in a series of categories. As the user mouses over the timeline anchors, the lines obligingly move to reveal their text anchors which trigger the works themselves.

Reagan Library [47] and What We Will [66]have stunning 360-landscape animated anchors to sort content by place (and place and time in What We Will). Further, What We Will's anchor continues to move after the reader has accessed the material, indicating the increment of time in the day that that short video covers.

Content expanding

Anchors can also trigger animated content: I'm Simply Saying [35] is a simple example while Lexia to Perplexia [43] and _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode [44] present more complex panoplies. Readers "play" the anchors in Pax [46] to accumulate content that scrolls to the right of the playing field.