IFTTT released their first iPhone app today, and it comes with an extremely elegant onboarding sequence, a series of four screens that walk new users through the core “if this, then that” concept that is the foundation of the service. A bit of parallax animation reveals itself to the user as she swipes from screen to screen, and the effect is delightful.

Of course, this kind of micro-interaction is not particularly novel if you think about how popular parallax scrolling has become on the desktop Web, but it’s also surprisingly rare in the native app environment, which is theoretically even more conducive to clever animations. IFTTT’s onboarding is well done, but to me it’s a kind of baseline — there should be lots more animations that are even more inventive than this. That doesn’t necessarily mean heavier, more complex work, either; a little bit can go a long way.

You can see an animated GIF of these screens here, but personally I think it’s better when you can see a real user interact with the screens, so I shot this ad hoc video too.

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