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Improve your app’s UI with animations
June 21, 2025
Animations can add visual cues that notify users about what’s going on in your app and improve their understanding of its interface. Animations are useful when loading content, or when a screen changes state. They can also add a glossy look to your app, which gives it a higher quality feel.
Animations are not necessarily meant to make your app pretty. They are meant to grab the attention of the user and enhance their experience. With thousands of applications available for download every day, yours will only stand a chance if it’s not boring or unpleasant to users.
Some of the reasons for incorporating animations into your application include:
Here is how you can implement some of these animations in your app to improve the user experience.
Introduction Slider
This is meant to showcase the different features of your application. Users will be able to navigate through the screens using swipe gestures or they can skip the introduction and go to the main application.
The introduction slider should be shown only when the app is launched for the first time. Subsequent launches should direct the user to the main screen. We are going to have three slides in our application to show the user the three most important aspects of our application.
The final result should look like this:
Add this XML to a new file calledslide.xml:
And this toslide2.xml:
And inslide3.xml:
Next, we are going to design the welcome screen. Create another activity (activity_welcome.xml) and add the following to the XML file:
The XML file contains a view pager responsible for the swipe actions and buttons, which take the user to the next (or back to the previous) screen. You will also need the strings.xml for the definitions like“@string/redeem”etc.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, the welcome screen should only be shown the first time the application is launched. To achieve this, create a class named PrefManager.java and call setFirstTimeLaunch(true) when the app is launched for the first time.
Lastly, add the following code toWelcomeActivity.java:
Don’t forget to set theWelcomeActivityas the launcher in the manifest file:
Animating Buttons
Buttons are an integral part of any application because they communicate and give feedback when clicked. Let’s see how we can animate a button to show the correct feedback after it has been pressed.
In your drawable folder, add a drawable XML (drawable/ripple.xml) file which we will use as our background for the button to achieve the ripple effect:
Edit the button to use the ripple XML as the background, as shown below.
Now our button will show ripples when touched.
It is possible to add interesting and helpful animations to your app with some simple techniques. It’s worth noting that although animations are important to enhance the user experience, overusing animations or using them inappropriately can diminish the quality of experience, too.
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