Motion boundaries
Animation should support comprehension, hierarchy, and feedback without hiding content or making checkout, account, cart, navigation, or form flows harder to use. Treat motion as production UI behavior, not as decoration that can skip review.
Interaction review
Check trigger, duration, easing, reduced-motion behavior, keyboard reachability, focus visibility, hover and touch states, and whether the effect runs repeatedly. The Theme Assistant feature page explains the design workspace, while publishing and rollback explains how to keep the final CSS recoverable.
Performance and rollback
Avoid broad animations that affect large layouts, product grids, sticky navigation, checkout steps, or low-powered mobile devices. Record what selectors changed, how to disable the animation, and which breakpoints were tested before approval.
Owner and cadence
- Primary owner: designer or developer, with site-owner approval for production visual impact.
- Review cadence: before publishing, after theme updates, and after cache or WooCommerce template changes.
- Escalate when motion affects accessibility, focus, reduced-motion behavior, checkout clarity, mobile performance, or repeated visitor-facing interactions.
Production checklist
- Review trigger, duration, easing, reduced-motion behavior, focus state, keyboard behavior, hover state, touch behavior, and affected selectors.
- Test animations on mobile and low-powered devices before applying them to repeated storefront surfaces.
- Capture the affected URL, target selector, intended visual outcome, reviewer, and rollback note for every meaningful visual change.
- Review mobile, desktop, keyboard focus, reduced motion, contrast, checkout, cart, account, and navigation behavior before publishing.
Acceptance checks
- Motion can be disabled or rolled back without removing unrelated design work.
- The interaction improves comprehension or feedback without obscuring content, checkout actions, or accessibility states.
- The proposed CSS or presentation output can be traced to a specific page, component, and design goal.
- The reviewer can reject, revise, or roll back the change without guessing which selectors were affected.
Common mistakes
- Adding motion without reduced-motion behavior, keyboard review, mobile performance checks, or a simple disable path.
- Publishing broad CSS from a single preview without checking logged-out, mobile, checkout, account, and cache states.
- Using external design references as production assets instead of review context.
Related operations
- Review Publishing and Rollback for Theme Changes.
- Pair motion review with Responsive and Accessibility Review.
- Use Responsive and Accessibility Review before visual publishing.
- Use Client Presentation Workflow when an agency needs client approval.
- Use Publishing and Rollback for Theme Changes before approving production CSS.
- Use Multi-Page Consistency Checker before broad component updates.
- Use Design Tokens and Style System before token-level changes.