[kinggencha]

Putting animated GIFs into your documentation or blog articles, negatively impacts legibility. The constant movement diverts attention and makes people skip that section so they can just scroll the annoyance out of view. If you MUST include animated guidance for whatever reason, use videos that have playback controls and are paused by default.

Seeing this in an article on how to improve documentation makes me question any message you might try to get across.

[shahednasser]

Thank you for your opinion. We actually don't use GIFs in our documentation and are limiting the use of screenshots and similar visual assets as it can go stale easily. We do rely on videos where necessary.

[remoquete]

There are ways of adding reproduction controls to animated GIFs. Animations have their place and purpose depending on the type of documentation, especially when you want to illustrate some complex steps.

[autoexec]

When is an animated GIF showing a series of complex steps better than a video of the same? The video has the advantage of offering things like audio, higher quality playback, the ability to be downloaded locally and played in VLC (where you can do things like zoom in or slow it down), etc. Maybe not all of those things are needed in every case, but even then video will get the job done just as well as a GIF and provide consistency with any instance where you do end up needing video's features.

[euroderf]

I for one am a text person, and for me video is death - the end of my attention. Very very few videos use my time as effectively as I can when I am setting the pace and maybe deciding when and how to skip around.

Give me (please) well-done illustrations.

[autoexec]

I agree that if something can be explained in text I'd much prefer it over a video, but if you need (or expect some people will need) to see a video a GIF seems like the weaker option for how to present that.

[euroderf]

If you're given a task that is not obvious and requires pauses for familiarization at several steps, isn't it easier to deal with text+illustrations than with video ?

[j45]

And animated gif is the same as an animated video sans audio.

Gifs can be used to not need a ply button to visually demonstrate something but the oerson making it must have some story boarding and visual communication skills.

Gifs are just one tool in the toolkit. Expecting anything to be silver bullet or disqualifying anything that isn’t a silver bullet sets backs documentation much more.

[marcosdumay]

> Gifs can be used to not need a ply button

You always want a play button. The idea that the video is so important that people should be watching it before they discover what page they are seeing or read any contextualizing text is absurd.

If you don't have a play button, nobody will watch the full video. This is ok for doomscrolling social media, but I am quite sure it's not ok for your use-case.

[j45]

I generally agree, but there are valid cases where play buttons aren’t needed for an animation in every case as you’re saying.

We literally have seconds if that to communicate enough for the user to decide their needs are represented in the screen, to stick around and read and click some more.

Let’s look at gifs and videos as something much simpler - an animation of frames that either auto plays or not.

Having a short, looping, auto playing animation showing a showing a feature or overview with a progress bar can be a positive implementation of negative doom scrolling patterns. Have seen this implemented very well in documentation in addition to text and videos.

The user can pay attention to a looping animation quite well because they’re used to it, including waiting for the loop to restart like they’re already used to. This in turn can accidentally feed some reinforcement learning mechanisms, especially where the primacy effect is involved. Watch the short loop a few times before diving into the full video.

Another use that work well is automated and timed flash cards where clicking, no JavaScript or being offline can be a consideration. Good for hands free, or limited hand use availability. Yes it can be scripted too.

Animations can also be useful within a carousel on a hero component where the resistance to press play on a video might be occurring.

Gifs and their ability to animate frames is just a capability, how we’ve seen them used should not define the limits of what they’re good for.

[NikolaNovak]

Inertia maybe? A web page peppered with video controls and blocks seems busy and distracting to me. It feels like heaviness, bloat and overhead (even if technically it isn't). A couple of GIF animations showing simple actions works for me. So it may be more subjective than objective?

[remoquete]

For steps that take less than 10 seconds, I’m not sure a video would prove superior; GIFs are easier to produce and easier to publish. Then again, I’m also pro-videos.

Edit: typo