Animations are also a way to explain causal relationships between interactions and their results, and to help build mental models of software behaviour.
Being related to neither software behavior nor the structure of the underlying problem, animations tend to obscure the causal relationships and make it harder for user to build a correct mental model.
Being related to neither software behavior nor the structure of the underlying problem, animations tend to obscure the causal relationships and make it harder for user to build a correct mental model.