Forum Discussion
Animated decorative elements
Currently in order to make pages more engaging, if we want to add animated elements which are purely decorative, we have to use gif format images which are pretty terrible for file size.
Are there any plans for allowing videos to be used as decorative elements? e.g. muted auto-play looped, possibly as a background option in the block's style options? or as additional options for the video block?
Having this as a option would significantly improve the file sizes over gifs.
A decorative animation distracts from learning. It pulls the user's eyes away from the important content and increases cognitive load.
I think the best way to make pages "more engaging" is to provide M&Ms: meaningful & memorable content. They need to know "WIIFM" (what's in it for me). And they need to see how it fits into the scenarios/ tasks they're learning about.
Which is why we want to use them appropriately.
We are striking a balance between engaging, interesting, appealing, accessible and optimised for learning.
We don't want to go to the extreme of say www.gov.uk which is excellent for accessibility and usability, but not very appealing visually and we don't want to go the extreme the other way making the page overwhelming.
However what we currently are doing does have limitations and one of them is around the limitations gifs impose.
We are using gifs, we're just limiting them to basic animations which can be optimised for compression because we don't have the capability in Rise to use videos as decorative elements.
Edit to clarify, by 'we', I mean the team I'm part of, I'm not trying to speak for anyone beyond that.Thanks Hazel,
I've put it in as a feature request as well :)
