How Robinhood’s Product Creative Team Bridges Product & Brand with LottieFiles
Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
Summary & Key ROI
Robinhood is a financial services company founded in 2013 with a mission to democratize finance by making investing simple and accessible. Through its intuitive mobile and web platform, it pioneered commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs, options, and crypto, empowering millions of everyday users to participate more easily in the financial markets.
Robinhood’s Product Creative team integrated LottieFiles into their production workflow to bridge the gap between their design vision and the final product experience, which resulted in:
Stronger Brand Personality: Lottie-powered motion helps Robinhood express a colorful, vibrant brand identity, making the app feel more human and energetic than traditional finance platforms.
"Animations create 'screenshotable moments' that reinforce the brand essence." Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
Higher User Engagement and Retention: Motion-driven onboarding moments create emotional connection, celebration, and “screenshotable” experiences that increase engagement.
Reduced Perceived Wait Time: Replacing static support screens with animated loaders significantly lowered perceived wait time and improved user patience.
Improved Educational Clarity: Animated onboarding and account transfer flows make complex tasks feel simpler, safer, and easier to complete, reducing friction for new and existing users.
Operational Excellence in Handoff: Robinhood’s product creative team established a high-standard motion documentation workflow, enabling smooth, efficient collaboration with engineering and speeding up implementation.
The Challenge: Integrating Expressive Motion That Solves Engineering Challenges
Robinhood’s Product Creative team needed a solution to integrate complex, expressive motion graphics into their app without compromising performance, increasing file size, or demanding months of engineer development time.
Robinhood’s visual language is characterized by being very colorful, utilizing clean shape layers, and incorporating illustrative elements for user education. The team found that replicating these complex, custom visual elements and expressive motions using traditional engineering code (CSS/JavaScript) was extremely time-consuming, potentially taking months for simple actions.
"A lot of those [visual and illustrative elements] could not be replicated in code on the engineering side because it would probably take months to do something very simple." Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
This led to a disconnect between the lively brand and the interactive product they wanted to achieve, particularly in crucial user education and engagement moments.
The Solution: Deep LottieFiles Integration
The adoption of LottieFiles, which began between 2019 and2020, provided a solution that closed their engineering gaps.
"Lottie really genuinely allowed us to kind of connect them [product and brand] in a much stronger and more cohesive way." Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
"The open-source nature of Lottie was noted as a 'huge deal' because the company prioritizes 'safety first' and requires tools to follow strict standards, giving them control over their content,” he further added.
The key advantages that Lottie offers are:
Bridging Product and Brand: Lottie enabled the team to deploy the brand's visual language and expressive motion directly into the product, which would have been impossible with traditional code-driven animation.
Performance and Scalability: Lottie was the preferred choice due to its ability to offer the best performance, vector quality scalability, and the smallest file size possible—a crucial factor for a mobile-friendly product. MP4s and image sequences were deemed too large and didn’t offer the required level of control.
Security and Control: The open-source nature of Lottie was a significant security advantage, as it allowed the team to keep all files and intellectual property on their own systems, adhering to strict corporate "safety first" and data control standards.
Design Control: Lottie provides the design team with the high level of control necessary to push animations to their limits and ensure accurate, pixel-perfect results in the app.
Impact & Engagement Results: An Improved Customer Experience
Azeem stated that the use of Lottie was their best choice in terms of performance, and scalability with vector quality, while also being the smallest file size possible.
“Lottie really genuinely allowed us to kind of connect them [product and brand] in a much stronger and more cohesive way. In customer support, replacing a 'dead' waiting screen with a visual loader helped build retention, and a waitlist animation where users could interact with a small 'fidget spinner' reduced the perceived wait time significantly,” Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
The use of Lottie-enabled motion has been central to several key product and customer experience goals:
Brand Personality: Motion is used to reflect the company’s colorful and vibrant brand, ensuring the app feels lively, responsive, and not "lacking soul" compared to competitors in the financial industry.
User Emotion and Retention: A key objective is to make users feel acknowledged and celebrated, particularly during onboarding. The motion work has led to high engagement and "screenshotable moments" that reinforce the brand essence.
Customer Support and Perceived Wait Time:
Replacing a "dead" waiting screen in customer support with a visual loader helped improve retention.
A successful interactive waitlist animation (a small "fidget spinner") significantly reduced the perceived wait time for users, even when the actual wait time was brief.
Educational Flows: Animated flows, such as the public onboarding and account transfer processes, are used to make otherwise overwhelming experiences feel educational, safe, and easy to understand.
Internal demand for animation remains high as product managers and internal teams recognize that motion increases engagement and screen time. With their use of Lottie, the Robinhood product creative team is credited internally for setting an exceptionally high standard for motion handoff documentation and specification, leading to highly effective collaboration with engineering teams.
"Lottie provided the best performance, scalability with vector quality, and the smallest file size possible, checking off all requirements." Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
Looking Forward Into the Future
With Lottie now firmly embedded in their design-to-engineering pipeline, Robinhood has a scalable, high-performance motion system that user experience across onboarding, education, and support touchpoints.
The Robinhood team is now exploring several areas to further optimize their Lottie workflow:
Technical Feature Requests: They have requested better support for "masked feathers" to improve gradient and color blending, which currently requires glitchy workarounds across platforms.
Engineering Handoff: They are seeking a more detailed controlling structure within the Lottie previewer to help engineers easily find and adjust nested animated details (like position or scale keyframes). This would allow a single asset to be used for both dark and light modes, reducing app size and asset swapping.
File Format Exploration: The team is re-exploring the dotLottie (.lottie) file format, which supports multiple color themes and animations in a single file, offering a significantly smaller file size than the current .json format.
"The open-source nature of Lottie was noted as a 'huge deal' because the company prioritizes 'safety first' and requires tools to follow strict standards, giving them control over their content." Azeem Segrave | In-Product Motion, Robinhood
As they look ahead, their focus is on deepening this integration and unlocking even more expressive potential through advanced features and new formats. The partnership between Robinhood’s creative vision and LottieFiles’ motion ecosystem continues to open doors for richer, clearer, and more transparent financial experiences for millions.
