Remember the days where we had blinking banners and fully static (sometimes, all too colorful) webpages?
Yeah, we’ve come pretty far with the World Wide Web—hello, AI.
Now, brands are rethinking user experience with one powerful tool: motion design. Motion design serves both function and feel, which are crucial parts of a user’s digital experience.
But what constitutes a great digital experience? We believe that would be one that flows effortlessly, is emotionally resonant, and is story-driven; something that motion design can help you achieve. Plus, you only have about 50 milliseconds to make an impression on the web and animations can convey a message quickly.
On top of that, users now expect fluidity, feedback, and fast-loading digital interfaces. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be part of that picture, but it doesn’t mean it has to dominate the entire process. Now, let’s dive into how motion design can strengthen your entire user experience (UX).
Motion design serves more than just aesthetics
Everybody creates content but motion design helps cut through the clutter and noise to get your message heard.
Want your audience to look at your key features? Use scroll-triggered animations that reveal them one by one. How about creating a brand style for that vibe check? Try slow fluid fades or soft easing curves for a calming, trustworthy feel (perfect for a wellness brand!). Or use snappy and clean transitions if you’d like to suggest efficiency and control for a fintech brand.
This isn’t new information though. A study from 1996 evaluated how transition smoothness, realism, and interactivity influence decision accuracy, speed, and user satisfaction. It confirmed that gradual and interactive animations support clearer mental models and improve overall performance.
There are also more recent studies that support this. A 2024 study found that techniques like staging and tracing animations in time-series visualizations help users identify patterns more accurately and quickly, effectively reducing cognitive load.
Plus, animations convey messages much faster than static images would. In fact, Korean food delivery app, Baemin, turned their static icons into animated ones to give users more clarity. For example, their “Order Together” service icon was initially interpreted as a friend-adding icon, but after animating it, it explained the meaning of togetherness and helped users understand its actual function.
How teams are scaling motion today
Historically, when thinking of adding animations, we often worried it would compromise our website, especially the load time. Besides that, adding motion also presented bottlenecks like must-have After Effects skills, endless rounds of QA, and developer negotiations.
But things are different now.
There are more tools that push motion without having to design from scratch. Even LottieFiles for Webflow allows you to simply drag-and-drop from a library of over 100,000 free and ready-to-use lightweight, scalable Lottie animations into your Webflow site—without needing to code. And if you’re an existing LottieFiles user, you can access your team’s private animations and insert them into your Webflow site too.
Moreover, LottieFiles for Webflow lets you personalize animations with the app’s color palette. The best part? It also supports trigger-based animations like page load, parallax, and reveal to give you a more connected UX.
Real examples of motion in brand UX
With elements that enter or respond on a page, it can help signal tone, brand personality, and intention. For example, a simple bouncing animation could create a playful tone, while using scale and timing can grab attention.
But not all motion is created equal. There are different file formats such as Lottie animation, a JSON-based file format, that is more lightweight compared to other formats like GIF or MP4s. Lottie works better for digital experiences as it’s also infinitely scalable without pixelation and has multi-platform support and libraries, as well as interactivity (great for interactions like scrolling, clicking, and hovering). Plus, because it’s small, it doesn’t compromise page load speed.
Besides Lottie animation, there is an even smaller file format — dotLottie. dotLottie is a more optimized Lottie format that bundles one or more Lottie animations in one, which helps improve load times and memory usage.
But don’t take just our word for it, here are some other real-life examples of motion in UX:
CNN Create turns storytelling into a moving experience
CNN Create’s Booming Bangladesh story used simple Lottie animations to complement the narrative.
CNN Create saw the value of animations with their ‘Booming Bangladesh’ story as they used animations with a long vertical scroll. Their smooth and subtle Lottie animations guided users through the narrative without causing distractions or breaks in engagement—perfect for an engaging, informative digital experience.
The result? The average time spent was two and half minutes across 30,000 unique visitors.
Gojek optimizes performance & app speed with dotLottie
Photo cap: Gojek uses rich animations to convey their services.
Gojek, a Southeast Asian multi-service tech platform, uses animations to convey various service elements in their user interface (UI). The team implemented dotLottie which allowed them to include more animations without exceeding app limits. In fact, their “Safe Trip Plus” animation shrank from 844 KB to just 107 KB.
Wise improves customer comprehension with user-friendly animations
Photo cap: Wise uses dotLottie animations throughout their UI.
Wise, a global Fintech company, implemented dotLottie animations in their simplified UI, product demos, photography, and storytelling— solidifying Wise’s reputation in providing a user-friendly, dynamic and innovative user experience. Adding these animations ultimately increased user comprehension of Wise’s key features.
Spoon brings emotional resonance with visually-rich animations
Photo cap: Spoon translates emotion with Lottie animations.
Global tech startup, Spoon, redefines social connection through an audio-based content platform. They understood that emotions like gratitude, encouragement, and joy are hard to capture with static visuals, so they turned to animations. But they also needed it to be lightweight and non-disruptive, which led them to Lottie that keeps their files under 1MB.
Can AI help with adding motion to your website?
In short: yes, it can help with motion…but in a more supportive role. AI can help with layout ideas, auto-tag content, or even recommend design patterns based on your data.
The thing is, AI can’t feel the way we do. At least not yet. That’s where designing a screen transition, understanding how elements react to a tap, or how an empty state makes you feel still requires empathy, brand context, and UX thinking— this is where your focus should be.
AI helps move the creative process along much faster, so you can focus on implementing motion that actually evokes emotion and connects to your audience.
Motion does more than delight — it delivers results
By now, we’ve established that motion is no longer for just delight. It helps build trust, set the site direction, and enhance brand feel—key factors that help drive results.
Motion is a language you speak to reach your users. While AI and no-code tools handle the heavy lifting, motion can be your differentiator in any industry.
Remember, instead of focusing on your projects looking good, make sure they feel good too. Make it intuitive— make it move.
