In the dynamic realm of web design, incorporating captivating effects into your website is key to creating an engaging and immersive user experience. As a creative platform and interactive web design tool, Hatch empowers you to enhance your websites with a variety of effects. These effects can help you transform your simple websites into interactive experiences for your community, fans, friends, or followers. Read more for inspiration and context, or feel free to skip ahead to our step-by-step guide outlining how to access Hatch effects.

What are Hatch effects?

Effects aren’t only the special visual effects you’re used to seeing on screens. They also encompass behavioral and dynamic animations. These types of effects coupled with visual effects help to improve user experience. In this post, we’ll introduce effects in the context of user experience design and interactivity, and highlight how to seamlessly integrate these effects onto your content.

Whether you’re showcasing artwork, videos, albums, or products– there are so many fun ways effects can help set your website apart. The slideshow effect is cool, and you can create one on Hatch easily. An example of how it works is the basic slideshow below.

Another idea is using Hatch’s fullscreen effect in a 3D designed space. The slideshow gallery below is an example of how the fullscreen effect looks. In this example, we show off content in a gallery simulated space– but you could make any scene for your content. Believe it or not, this took only a couple minutes to make! Why make a boring website with normal links and some conventional layouts when you have effects? We invite you to take your users on a journey through awesome user experiences.

You could also just have a grid of your content with the fullscreen effect added to each image. Minimalism is cool too.

Click the slideshow to see the fullscreen effect in action!
Voila! Fullscreen mode activated.

Introduction to User Experience Design and Interactivity

User experience (UX) design is a discipline that focuses on crafting meaningful and enjoyable experiences for website visitors. Interactivity lies at the heart of UX design, enabling users to engage with content actively. They are invited to interact with elements on a website or app. This is different than other types of media, like video or even this blog post. Sure, you’re actively watching or reading this content– but you’re only given the choice to bounce around the page. Though, that’s also an example of interactivity!

Another clear example of digital media that requires a high level of interactivity and user experience forethought is games. When you play a game, you’re given choices for what you’d like to interact with. Take this scene with a character, for example. When you get to these types of pages in a game, you are given the agency to choose what you want to click. In this case, you can click the speech bubble to hear what the character is saying.

TIP: The fullscreen effect is used in this example. It’s a great effect to use if you’re making an interactive narrative or game.

Using Behavioral Effects: Enhancing User Experience Design

Behavioral effects play a pivotal role in improving user experience by guiding and delighting website visitors. Let’s look at something called the draggable effect to explore another simple example of behavioral effects.

An example of how to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites. This example utilizes the draggable and blur features. — This example is pretty self-explanatory and oh-so-much-fun. To try the fun yourself, drag the digital kitty around space here!

You can also add an element of surprise with subtle animations which provide visual cues that invite your users to interact with your page. Web animations and dynamic behavioral effects bring life to your content and create a sense of interactivity. By incorporating these effects strategically, you can direct users’ attention. This encourages exploration and helps foster a deeper connection with the content on your website.

Whether you’re designing an interactive portfolio website or a landing page, the seamless integration of effects enhances user interaction and elevates the overall user experience. With drag-and-drop functionality and animation tools that require no coding, Hatch is a great introduction to the world of digital interactivity. Effects allow you to explore your creativity and customize your content in a way that captivates and engages your audience really easily.

Using Animation Effects: Captivating and Engaging Your Audience

Animation effects are powerful tools for adding flair and personality to your web design. From subtle animations that bring a touch of elegance to your content to eye-catching visual effects that captivate your audience, animation breathes life into static web pages. With our platform’s animation tools, you can effortlessly add animation to elements on your website without writing a single line of code. This empowers you to create visually stunning and animated websites that leave a lasting impression on your visitors.

Using Visual Effects: Customizing Your Content for Impact

Visual effects allow you to customize and enhance your content, making it visually appealing and aligned with your brand identity. By leveraging a wide range of visual effects, you can create unique and memorable web pages that stand out from the crowd. From customizing backgrounds and typography to incorporating parallax scrolling and eye-catching transitions, these visual effects add depth and dimension to your website design. With our intuitive drag-and-drop functionality and no-code approach, you have full creative control to design visually stunning pages that resonate with your audience.

This lava lamp uses 2 different effects to get its proposed result.

First, we added the flying emojis element and chose emojis with our intended colors.

Next, we add these two effects to the page itself:

Blur
Contrast

By embracing the joys and power of interactivity, you can create websites that are not only visually appealing but also intuitive and user-friendly. Through micro interactions, hover effects, fullscreen effects and so many other interactive effects on Hatch, you can provide users with a seamless and enjoyable browsing experience. In turn, this increases your user engagement and satisfaction.

How to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites

The step-by-step tutorial

Watch our video tutorial, or follow along for the step-by-step instructions on how to access Hatch effects below.

To add effects to individual assets, we need to access the panel on the right, AKA the inspector. This panel allows us to look deep into a specific asset’s properties and adjust them.

Think of the content panel on the left as where we go to find individual assets to add to our page, and the inspector on the right as the place where properties for individual assets live.

Screenshot of: The panel on the right is called the inspector. This is where we can change the properties for the individual asset that's currently selected.
For example, there is nothing on the page which leaves the page itself selected. We can choose the background type and color, among other properties. Tip: The eyedropper tool is especially helpful in matching colors in a project to keep them consistent. Part of the step-by step tutorial for how to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites

How to add effects

1. To access effect properties, we go to the right-hand panel called the inspector. We click “Effects”.

Screenshot of: Click "Effects". Part of the step-by step tutorial for how to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites

2. To add an effect to this star asset, we click on “Effects” under the inspector panel.

Screenshot of: To add an effect to this star asset, we click on "Effects" under the inspector panel. Part of the step-by step tutorial for how to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites.

3. Next, click “Add an effect”.

Screenshot of: Next, click "add an effect". Part of the step-by step tutorial for how to use Hatch effects to enhance your websites.

4. After clicking “add an effect”, the effects tab will open in the content panel. This makes it easier to browse special effects and discover new options to add to the asset we have selected.

Here we chose the “hover grow” effect. This means that on our live site, the asset will grow in size when someone’s cursor hovers over it.