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Case study

AXIOM Motion Standards

AXIOM Motion Standards

A unified motion language for an enterprise design system

Senior UX designer · Edward Jones

Role

Senior UX designer

Timeline

8 months, ongoing

Scope

Motion principles, component animation, documentation

Outcome

Adopted firm-wide

Role

Senior UX designer

Scope

Motion principles, component animation, documentation

Timeline

8 months, ongoing

Outcome

Adopted firm-wide

The challenge

AXIOM was growing fast, and motion hadn't kept up. Animation varied from one product to the next, accessibility was inconsistent, and with no shared standard, engineers were inventing motion behavior case by case. The work was to make motion a deliberate part of the system: one language that communicated meaning, met accessibility needs, and scaled across web, mobile, and internal tools.

AXIOM was growing fast, and motion hadn't kept up. Animation varied from one product to the next, accessibility was inconsistent, and with no shared standard, engineers were inventing motion behavior case by case. The work was to make motion a deliberate part of the system: one language that communicated meaning, met accessibility needs, and scaled across web, mobile, and internal tools.

What I inherited

A patchwork, not a system. Motion lived as scattered one-off decisions with no baseline patterns, no documentation, and no agreement between design and engineering on how things should move. Accessibility considerations like reduced-motion were routinely missed. Teams were spread across products with their own timelines, so any standard had to earn its adoption rather than assume it.

A patchwork, not a system. Motion lived as scattered one-off decisions with no baseline patterns, no documentation, and no agreement between design and engineering on how things should move. Accessibility considerations like reduced-motion were routinely missed. Teams were spread across products with their own timelines, so any standard had to earn its adoption rather than assume it.

My role

I led the effort end to end: defining the motion principles, designing the component-level animations that demonstrated them, and writing the documentation engineers and designers would actually work from. I partnered with engineering to keep the standards technically feasible, took them through design governance for approval, and socialized them across product teams so adoption held. The harder half was never the curves and durations. It was building something teams would choose to use.

I led the effort end to end: defining the motion principles, designing the component-level animations that demonstrated them, and writing the documentation engineers and designers would actually work from. I partnered with engineering to keep the standards technically feasible, took them through design governance for approval, and socialized them across product teams so adoption held. The harder half was never the curves and durations. It was building something teams would choose to use.

Key decisions

Decision

Define motion by principles, not a fixed library of effects.

Define motion by principles, not a fixed library of effects.

Reasoning

Principles guided judgment across products in a way a catalog of canned animations never could. They kept motion tied to clarity, consistency, accessibility, and brand rather than ornament.

Principles guided judgment across products in a way a catalog of canned animations never could. They kept motion tied to clarity, consistency, accessibility, and brand rather than ornament.

Tradeoff

Principles need interpretation, so teams needed more education up front than a drop-in library would have required.

Principles need interpretation, so teams needed more education up front than a drop-in library would have required.

Decision

Build reduced-motion and cognitive load into the standard as the default, not an exception.

Build reduced-motion and cognitive load into the standard as the default, not an exception.

Reasoning

Accessibility was being missed precisely because it sat outside the process. Making it the baseline meant teams met it without having to think about it.

Accessibility was being missed precisely because it sat outside the process. Making it the baseline meant teams met it without having to think about it.

Tradeoff

It put real limits on how elaborate motion could get, keeping timing and behavior inside safe, inclusive bounds.

It put real limits on how elaborate motion could get, keeping timing and behavior inside safe, inclusive bounds.

Decision

Ship documentation and examples engineers could implement directly, not a philosophy.

Ship documentation and examples engineers could implement directly, not a philosophy.

Reasoning

The standard would only hold if it reduced work. Pairing every pattern with a usable example is what turned a guideline into something teams adopted.

The standard would only hold if it reduced work. Pairing every pattern with a usable example is what turned a guideline into something teams adopted.

Tradeoff

Investing that heavily in documentation slowed the initial definition, but it's what made the standard real instead of aspirational.

Investing that heavily in documentation slowed the initial definition, but it's what made the standard real instead of aspirational.

Selected artifacts

A few of the standards in use, and the reasoning behind them.

Animation Examples

Animation Examples

Select Dropdown

Enables a user to quickly select between a list of options, and then see the option selected.

Enables a user to quickly select between a list of options, and then see the option selected.

Context Tabs

Enables users to alternate between views within the same context.

Tooltips

Contextual information that is triggered by clicking or hovering.

Context Tabs

Enables users to alternate between views within the same context.

Button and interaction states across types, on light and dark. The point was consistency, the same motion logic reading the same way everywhere it appears.

Outcome

The standards were approved through design governance and adopted across the firm's products. Motion became consistent where it had been fragmented, accessibility moved from afterthought to default, and engineers gained examples that cut the guesswork out of implementation. The documentation became part of how new team members were onboarded, which is the clearest sign a standard has taken hold: people reach for it without being told.

Motion is communication before it is decoration. The real task wasn't how things moved, it was building a standard teams would actually reach for.

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© 2026 Arman Musaji

Email:

armanmusaji@gmail.com