Delighting users with product animations — Meet EF-backed startup, LottieLab.
I’m super excited to introduce LottieLab and announce our recent backing by Entrepreneur First.
We are enabling tech teams to create delightful product experiences for their users by building the world’s best animation tool for digital design.
This started with a casual conversation and a personal pain point I and Alistair (my co-founder) shared from our experience running design and software agencies respectively; our obsession with creating top-notch product experiences was often stifled by having to produce animated interactions with existing processes, E.g coding from scratch ourselves or using After Effects.
Within a couple of months of validating this problem publicly, we’ve had thousands of designers and developers from the hottest tech and creative companies in the industry such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, TikTok, Duolingo, Twitter, Canva and many more sign up for our beta testing waitlist.
The power of animations
I love animations! I mean, how can you not?
I’ve been in the world of design for a little over a decade now and one of the most consistent trends I’ve observed is the power of storytelling and its impact on engagement.
UX design is more than just making products simpler to use, it’s delighting people through interactions that engage their emotions.
Various products leverage different methods to create compelling stories, and if a picture tells a thousand words… then animations, well, they tell millions!
Some problems just can’t be solved with a static interface of text and rounded rectangles.
Think of the slick product breakdowns on Apple’s homepage or the rewarding celebratory animations littered throughout Duolingo; How can a digital bird make you feel so good about a new milestone?
The power of high fidelity, fluid and dynamic animations in telling stories that instantly connect with us has been proven with a reported 4 times increase in user engagement and a 70% increase in conversion rates.
From eye-catching landing pages to animated onboarding processes, being able to convey information in a more expressive way has made a success of various notable products including Calm and Tik Tok.
Entire teams at large organisations such as Twitter, Google and Airbnb are now dedicated to interaction design, creating rich content beyond just text and boxes.
So why can’t every app or website be… just more fun?
The truth is… ‘fun’ is costly.
The challenge ahead of us
Implementing high fidelity animation requires specialised knowledge at the intersection of programming and design, costing companies an excessive amount of time and money.
It’s just simply too tedious to use any existing process to achieve the results we imagine. If a designer wants to add slick animations to a product, they will need to work directly alongside an engineer as they code it from scratch.
For example, when Stripe wanted to build out landing pages in order to boost engagement, they hired a dedicated team of 10 designers and engineers, who spent the majority of their efforts on heavily-coded animated assets.
A tweet from their developers claimed their codebase was actually closer to that of a 3D game engine than a web page. That’s insane! But the outcome was amazing. However, not every company can afford this — designing high fidelity UX animation can cost hundreds of pounds (£) per second of animation.
Enters a glimmer of hope…
Recently, a new file type called Lottie has emerged, which makes it easier to create high fidelity animations and export them as code. This format which now works across Android, iOS, Web and Desktop has exploded in popularity.
Major design tools such as Figma, Webflow, Framer and ProtoPie now let you import Lottie files into your designs and there are entire marketplaces dedicated to sharing the filetype, the largest of them being Lottiefiles.com, which now hosts over 1 million users.
These are some of the common indicators that Lottie is on a rapid trajectory towards being the industry standard.
However, this new way of working faces many challenges. We have heard countless problems from designers and engineers about the pains caused by using a 30-year-old VFX tool, After Effects, for modern app development, the key ones being:
- After Effects is slowing down the animation process with plugin errors, incompatible features and a steep learning curve.
- The collaboration process is broken, with files being shared online in various versions.
- Implementation of animations on different operating systems and devices is a pain.
We are building the easiest tool for Lottie animation workflows from the ground up, satisfying the pains of existing designers and lowering the barrier of entry to interaction design through an editor that enables you to:
- Create animations with an intuitive tool built just for Lottie — Forget all the AE errors and incompatible plugin issues.
- Integrate with your existing workflow. Instantly import and edit assets from tools like Figma, Illustrator, After Effects and existing animations from the Lottie marketplace.
- Collaborate with your team of Designers, Developers and Product Managers on animation assets.
We are solely focusing on Lottie at the moment and we want you on our journey.
What’s next?
Our vision for the next 5 years is that the trend of increasingly complex and more interactive web applications will accelerate exponentially.
The web started as a source for document-centric files, an online library. But the modern web has shifted beyond static documents into a realm of highly interactive and engaging applications. Soon, any experience that doesn’t offer this level of delight will be left behind.
Our early users have been excited about use-cases and applications we hadn’t even considered, from customised clothing for e-commerce retailers through to dynamic television content for streamers.
In 5 years time, the web will look completely different and we are the tool that will accelerate this.
Since we started experimenting and building this product, we’ve had incredible feedback from the community, including many quotes such as the ones below:
Join us on this journey of creating more delightful experiences for users everywhere by signing up for early access to our beta!
