Live dashboards invite the temptation to animate everything. Resist it. Motion is a tool for directing attention, and like any attention mechanism it is a zero-sum budget: animate everything and you have animated nothing.
A few rules we hold ourselves to
- Animate change, not arrival — a value that updates earns a transition; a value that simply loaded does not.
- Keep durations short. If a user waits on your animation, it is too long.
- Always honour prefers-reduced-motion; motion is an enhancement, never a dependency.
- Never let an animation block the data behind it from being read.
Good dashboard motion is the kind users feel but never have to wait for.
The goal is a surface that feels alive because it reflects reality quickly — not one that feels busy because it is constantly in motion.