i turned off motion on my own site and felt nothing

dev · Jul 5, 2026 · 1 min read

i spent a week making this site move. springs, ripples, sliding panels, everything. and then i spent one evening using it with motion disabled, which is a setting i built months ago and never actually turned on.

the honest result: nothing was missing. nothing felt broken. i just read the whole thing faster.

this is not a new observation. designers have known it for years. what is new to me is having built both sides of it. the motion is genuinely nice. it is also, for a lot of people, a tax they pay on every visit to enjoy a feature they did not ask for.

so now there is a global toggle in the settings, and it defaults to respecting prefers-reduced-motion, which is what WCAG 2.3.3 asks for. the springs are still there for the people who want them.

the design lesson i am taking from this is small and annoying: as a ux designer, the motion is not the feature. the task is the feature. motion is seasoning, and a restaurant that puts seasoning on everything tastes like nothing.