When Motion Got Principled

Since 2020, UX Designer Sharon Harris has been a manager at Google Maps. Previously working as a motion lead, Harris evolved her role to increase the emotional and expressive feeling of products. She also helps motion specialists get a seat at the table with product and engineering partners.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Sharon recounts her first years at Google working on Material’s motion guidelines and describes her realization of just how widespread their impact would be.

I started at Google in 2016, a few months before the first Material guidelines for motion design were published. When I joined, there were fewer than 100 motion designers at the company. A small community was responsible for everything from defining component behaviors and transitions from screen to screen, to building internal conceptual demos and external marketing campaigns. I also did a lot of advocacy about the value of motion design in product design. People already knew that motion was important, but not necessarily why.

At the time, the Material team was already thinking about the launch of the next version of the guidelines. We were investigating the different design elements that could be updated and deciding what was missing. I did a lot of concepting with visual, interaction, and motion designers, as well as with UXE and other engineers. Then, closer to 2018 we started honing in on what we were actually going to update. The motion team updated the M1 guidelines with new principles, swapped abstract examples with more realistic ones, and generally tightened up the motion chapter.

Joining Google taught me that while motion is met with a lot of excitement, there’s also a fair bit of skepticism from product and engineering. They want to understand: What’s the value of motion? (Sometimes it can feel like this question is code for: Is it such a small detail that we can ignore it for now?) To add to the mix, while it’s easy to show motion in concepts or websites, when it comes to the product, it is really tough to add motion to interactions. So the bar for determining whether or not motion is “worth it” is high. Nobody wants to waste resources on something that may not move the needle. Defining motion guidelines helped us communicate motion’s importance by highlighting its role in shifting user behavior.

From the start, I had those “holy crap” moments. This small group was working on what many people see as the Bible for UX design! The guidelines were not only for all of Google but also for third-party products.

We launched in May 2018. The responsibility sank in for me when I began meeting with product teams at Google, teaching the guidelines in front of an audience, and talking with customers at conferences like I/O. Those conversations put things in perspective: People need guidelines, and they trust us to lead the way. It’s always thrilling to see another company following a pattern that we’ve defined.

Material continues to function as a source of truth at Google, even when the system or elements of it have to be adapted to each product’s specific needs. And outside of Google, the Material guidelines are still one of the best collections of UX guidelines that you can find. The guidelines remain a source of truth for how to think about guidelines and for how to take a principled approach to using design systems in your product.