Predicting and Diagnosing User Engagement with Mobile UI Animation via a Data-Driven Approach

Animation, a common design element in user interfaces (UI), can impact user engagement (UE) with mobile applications. To avoid impairing UE due to improper design of animation, designers rely on resource-intensive evaluation methods like user studies or expert reviews. To alleviate this burden, we propose a data-driven approach to assisting designers in examining UE issues with their animation designs. We first crowdsource UE assessments of mobile UI animations. Based on the collected data, we then build a novel deep learning model that captures both spatial and temporal features of animations to predict their UE levels. Evaluations show that our model achieves a reasonable accuracy. We further leverage the animation feature encoded by our model and a sample set of expert reviews to derive potential UE issues of a particular animation. Finally, we develop a proof-of-concept tool and evaluate its potential usage in actual design practices with experts