Well-designed animations can improve the usability of graphical user interfaces for business software. It is crucial in this area that the user considers animations to be helpful and that they do not decrease perceived work efficiency. Thus, both the acceptance of animations and the selection of an appropriate animation speed are of high importance. We investigate those aspects in three explorative studies. Results show that animated interactions are considered to be useful by a considerable majority of participants. The observed settings for the animation speed show that quite fast animations are generally preferred. We demonstrate that for some of these animations the observed settings for animation speed can be explained by cognitive modeling.