How ActBlue scales web animations with LottieFiles

Summary

ActBlue is one of the most widely used American fundraising platforms in progressive politics, powering donations for Democratic campaigns, candidates, and causes across the United States. In this interview video, ActBlue’s Digital Designer, Will Vo, shares how his team went from having no animation workflow to using Lottie as the backbone of their website storytelling, and what that shift has meant for collaboration and craft across the creative team.

Key Notes

• No workflow to LottieFiles workflow: Before LottieFiles, ActBlue's team had no real animation process. Small file sizes and easy web implementation made Lottie the entry point into motion design.

• Workspace as single source of truth: Every animation now lives in their LottieFiles Workspace, making versions easy to find and exports fast, replacing a scattered, multi-step process from previous tools.

• Static to storytelling on web: Lottie animations replaced static pages with layered scroll experiences and richer hover states, directly improving the ActBlue website experience.

• Motion as a differentiator: Motion is now seen as a necessity, not an extra, in a crowded digital landscape where it's what makes an experience stand out.

Transcript

Host: We're so excited to have you. I have a few questions for you. I just want to learn more about your journey in ActBlue just using LottieFiles. My first question is, how did your animation workflow look before LottieFiles? What were your biggest pain points? How have things changed on this time? How were things before?

Will Vo: To give you some context about our animation workflow before LottieFiles [often referred to as 'Lottie' by the speaker], if I were to be honest, it was sort of non-existent in the fact that we didn't know what direction to take and what to do. I'm the Digital Designer on ActBlue's creative team, so I'm in charge of figuring out the website experience. Before that, we were trying to figure out how to implement storytelling and how to make things less static-looking. Having heard about LottieFiles through the grapevines, through marketing, and just a lot of the features that you guys rolled out with at the beginning, I found that it was the best implementation for our website experience because of how easy it is to implement into a website and also how small of a file size it could be, which could support faster web optimization. We didn't really have an animation workflow at the beginning, but implementing LottieFiles just gave us that backbone to really start.

Host: Continuing with this, I have another question for you, and it's regarding the handoff part—compatibility, export sizes, right? When it comes to delivering these animations, has it been beneficial for your team? What advantages have you seen in that regard?

Will Vo: Yeah, I'm so appreciative of LottieFiles because it's sort of like something I don't really have to worry about. I can use LottieFiles workspace as a digital asset manager. I know where the animations are, I know where I can find the different versions, and I know that once it's in LottieFiles [workspace], I can export it into whatever file type it is. For me, using LottieFiles for WordPress, I know we're keeping all of our animations within LottieFiles [workspace], and I can export it as a Lottie file and just upload it to WordPress. If we were to switch it out, I know that I can find it.

One of the most difficult pain points that I've seen when it comes to keeping animation files is that there's so many different versions. What do the animations look like? There's so many steps in terms of like other tools in playing the animation. But you're in LottieFiles, you play the animation, you export it—it's almost like instantaneous. So it makes it so much easier for everyone.

Host: Moving on, I want to talk about the workspace. You mentioned some of the benefits of being able to have version control and to preview things automatically. I want to talk also from the collaboration angle. Having the files there, working between designers and devs, exporting, and all of that—what are the biggest wins that you have of using the LottieFiles workspace?

Will Vo: I think the biggest wins—we don't have devs on our team—but the biggest win is sort of just seeing everyone's growth and journey in their own motion craft. One of my team members, Hope, is very new to motion like me, we tried to figure out a celebratory animation that can work for one of our marketing campaigns. We could have done that from scratch. But after having the meeting with you Jaime (host), looking at the physics engine and also looking at a Lottie premium animation, preset ones, we took that training and inspiration from the community and brainstormed a way that we can turn that into our own branding. Just seeing that and the speed of how fast we had to move to implement that was really exciting because if we did that from scratch, it probably wouldn't happen.

Host: Would still be going on?

Will Vo: Yeah, still be going on. So being able to execute on that was really exciting and definitely a win for our team.

Host: Do you still think that having Lottie animations in your product makes an impact on revenue, performance, or metrics at all?

Will Vo: I think so. When I'm talking about Lottie, I'm mainly talking about our website experience. Before, it was static and very hard to story-tell. Now with Lottie, we can take multiple concepts, put them in the animation, and it feels more lively when you're scrolling through our websites and interacting with hover states. I really do believe it is helpful.

If I were to sort of introduce anyone to Lottie, it is more of the designers who are very strong graphically but want to emphasize this new wave of storytelling. That's where Lottie can really shine when it comes to portraying your graphics.

Host: What do you think about motion in design? How important is it becoming to have motion as part of your design strategy nowadays?

Will Vo: I think it's more of a necessity at this point, just because there's so much out there right now, and in order for you to really stand out, you need to think outside the box. I think, animation and motion really deliver on that where you have that extra layer that you can add to your experiences that can really bring attention to users who are scrolling through your experiences or watching your ads.

Host: Well final thing: what's the coolest animation you have done—the one that you're most proud of? What is it about, or where did it apply? The one that you remember the most and say 'Hey man this animation was something else'.

Will Vo: The most memorable one for me was when we launched a training resource center. We were trying to figure out how to implement images of people, how to implement concepts of training, and what users can find on this page. So we developed a little animation of a search UI plus users hovering over the search trying to look up questions. And so, that brought together a lot of the pain points that we were having in terms of how to implement people imagery into UI and how to tell that story over multiple different concepts. That was fun, and it also taught me how to animate product UI a little bit.