Plenty of enterprise designers will swear on their Herman Miller chairs that motion is nothing but a distraction. A frivolous, showboating circus act. They'll tell you that when someone's grinding away on a tool day in, day out—cranking through data, slamming out reports, clawing toward inbox zero—they don't need flair. They need speed. Raw, immediate, Terminator-style efficiency. Click a button, BAM! Next screen. Instantaneous. No fuss. No delay.
To hell with delight, they say. New pages should appear like hallucinations in the desert; sudden, seamless, and slightly alarming. Anything more—any hint of "animation"—gets tossed out with the same disdain they reserve for serif fonts. Just give me the data and get out of the way.
Now look, there's truth buried in that crusade for speed. Motion purely for the sake of delight is a foul ball. (Here's looking at you, scrolling marquee text.) People don't want to wrestle with lag when they're elbow-deep in enterprise hell. They need tools that are sharp, fast, and damn near invisible. Fine. But let's not pretend people suddenly transform into soulless productivity robots the moment they clock in.
These same folks? They're glued to their phones—constantly. Scrolling, tapping, navigating their way through sleek, buttery-smooth interfaces like it's second nature. And guess what? Motion is everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a single interaction on an iPhone that doesn't include some sliver of animation; a swipe, a fade, a fluid transition that gently whispers, "You're not lost, friend, you're moving forward." If motion was such a menace, Cupertino would've nuked it from orbit a decade ago. But they didn't. Because when done right, motion doesn't slow you down—it greases the rails.
Motion whispers meaning through the fog. It amplifies what's already there, giving shape and context to the chaos. That screen didn't just appear—it arrived from somewhere, and your brain picks up on that. That button didn't just vomit content onto the page; something moved, something shifted, and now your eyes know where to go. It's choreography, not decoration.
When the motion is painstakingly dialed in—thoughtful, intentional, surgical—people don't even notice it. They just feel it. They say, "Wow, this app feels good." Not flashy. Not cool. Just right. That's motion doing what copy and color alone can't; helping people move faster by actually understanding what the hell just happened. And that, my friend, is real speed.