Companies wrestling for businesses on the web prefer having appealing websites with rich user interfaces and stunning visual effects. jQuery has simplified the task of presenting dynamic content along with the visual effects. With jQuery, you can rapidly create advance, feature-rich websites. Now, you can develop standardized, highly responsive web pages using Ajax, create user-friendly forms, and add jQuery to enhance usability and user experience of the visitors.
There was a time, when we were just able to categorize images in tables, which were displayed in a new window or pop up with the user’s click; it is over now. Today, with amazing effects created by jQuery, it is easy to showcase image galleries in many attractive styles. jQuery effects give excellent usability experience to the users. Browsing and viewing contents and image galleries have went through a long journey in their development area. Today, a slew of superb jQuery Plugins is available to create amazing effects, which you would really love to have on your site.
Today we’ll dig into them a little bit, and see what you can use right now to enhance user experience in your website.
1. Thumbnail Proximity Effect
Using jQuery, you can add a smashing thumbnail proximity effect, where the elements are scaled along with the slight scaling of their encompassing elements according to their distances, as the user hovers over them. You can design it to display a descriptive content as well.
This is good to show products or gallery-type items, providing a cool way to focus user’s attention to one item and also gives him a tip that there is much more to be seen with the smaller items.
2. Hovercard
With Hovercard, you can nicely display any directly related and important information using hovered label, link, or html element. It displays related information using Ajax. It also comes integrated with the Facebook or Twitter, so that your site’s visitors can view any updates on a Facebook page or latest tweets by others.
This is specially useful if you have a big block of text and want to show more info that would fit in a tooltip and neither in a whole new page or block. So you just show a small box with the info that you want about someone (the author, for instance) or something (a book or website).
3. End of Page Slide-out Box
You might often have seen the box sliding out from the right when reaching end section of the article. With this jQuery effect, you can show up glimpse of the next related article or anything important about your site.
You can also show dynamically created stuff, like your fresh tweets. It adds up an element in the end section of the page that triggers the box to come out. This effect is something that really enhances the user experience.
Why not trying it to replace that ordinary list of related posts? I bet you’ll increase your click rate!
4. Textualizer
Textualizer is a very light jQuery Plugin, which can bring interesting effects on your site’s text. With Textualizer, you can achieve transition using blurb of text, while switching to a next blurb.
It’s like those movies “anagram revealing effect”, where all alphabets which also exist in the next blurb stay on the page and crawl to their new place.
You can set the duration for all elements and determine how you want them to appear as well as the time-period of the transactions. With several other options, users can pause, stop, and configure rotation actions.
5. Thumbnails Navigation Gallery
This is a sleek effect with scrolling thumbnails, which appear from a navigation items. jQuery is used with few CSS3 functions to add a style.
You can use it to showcase photographs or screenshots of your work, which will have their thumbnail version that is used in navigation. With the user’s click, the thumbnail loads a full-screen view of an image on the background wall.
6. Skitter
Skitter allows you to select from 20+ transitional slideshow effects to showcase images, which include cube, circles, blocks, blind, bars, strip, fade effects and lot of others. Moreover, it is a cross platform gallery, which your visitors will, certainly, enjoy.
7. Expanding Image Menu
This expanding image menu has a number of columns containing black & white image labels, which opens up the content laterally, when the user clicks on any. The same image in color overlaps the b&w image, giving a lively effect.
The demo is with a band website, but I bet it’d be awesome with your products, also!
8. Roundabout
Roundabout nicely presents disordered lists and nested HTML structures in entertaining, circular revolving tray, which moves the containing elements.
It can give a nice iTunes-like navigation through screenshots, photographs and anything that you want to show. It can be used even to add a nice looking clock effect. You should give it a try!
9. Cufonized Fly-out Menu
This is a wonderful, full-page cufonized menu with pleasing styles. As the user hovers over the menu item, a bar, with descriptive content, comes out from the left of the screen and connects to the selected menu item giving an interesting effect.
But with the advanced stage of @font-face maybe you should use that effect with this new approach 
10. Slidorion
Slidorion combines an image slider with an accordion, which you can use to show beautiful images with a changing descriptive content. Slidorion is an advance level of the basic jQuery slider, as images are associated to their respective contents and featured by a broad range of animations, like slideUp, slideRight, overDown, overLeft, and many more. Also, it has many useful functions for better customization, like auto play, settings for visual effects, speed and durations.
I think it would be a good call for magazine-like theme, sliding the latest news!
11. Lateral On-Scroll Sliding
“Slide-in on scroll” effect is an awesome effect, which many good sites are using today; a good thing is you can also have it. Items come in from sides in a sequence according to their scroll placements on the page.
The webpage is divided into two parts: left and right. The items come in view from outside of the screen to the center, when the user scrolls to their location. User gets enchanting experience by the style, where images and the contents come from the opposite sides. The sides, of texts and images, keep on changing to give a random effect.
As you can imagine it’s good for timely content, like timelines, histories or archives.
12. Flow Slider
Flow Slider is a simple, customizable jQuery plugin, which enables you to slide your HTML contents. Besides having good variety of transition effects, you can use some of your own, make configurations, change settings, link-up events, and arrange things in attractive designs. Flow Slider effects allow better interactivity to the user.
13. Slide Out Navigation
By designing a transparent slide out navigation or menu, you can render ease of access to your users.
The navigation is hidden with their heads out and the menu segment comes out, when the user hovers over them. This lovely and useful effect does not take any extra space on the site. As it is horizontally placed, so the menu is easily readable. Users can open up any icon by just hovering.
14. Flicker Effect
If you want to have a spooky theme on your site, then try out creating random flicker effect by jQuery. You can use it on any particular feature of your homepage, like in the demo you would see a zombie girl lurking in the woods. By adding very simple and short jQuery functions, you can promptly hide the element from view. It mainly involves stringed animations and pauses, where timing is the most critical thing. The thumb rule is to use some long pauses with rapid shifts in opacity to make it really perfect.
15. Page Flip Effect
You might have seen page flip effect on many websites, where one page flips like a book and the next page opens up. You probably have seen its Flash version, and this is a perfect copy done with nothing but JS.
You can use it for your books and documents or anything else, which you want the visitors to read like a book.