Motion System & UI Engineering
Northwind: a motion system that scales across a streaming platform
A streaming platform needed motion that felt intentional at 60fps on a five-year-old set-top box. We built the system that made it possible.
The Challenge
Northwind's playback interface animated inconsistently across devices: smooth in the design tool, janky on the living-room hardware most of their audience actually used. Every team hand-rolled its own transitions, and none of them budgeted for the low-power GPUs in the field.
Our Approach
We instrumented the real devices first, then wrote a motion specification as code: a small set of easing curves, durations, and choreography primitives expressed as design tokens. Engineering consumed the exact same tokens the design team edited, so a change to a curve propagated everywhere at once without a translation step.
The Outcome
The playback UI now holds a steady frame rate on the oldest supported hardware, and new surfaces inherit the motion language for free. What used to be a per-team argument is now a one-line import.
Results
What we measured
From the engagement
Dijour gave us the technical rigor our global rollout needed. The motion work is beautiful, but it is the architecture underneath that lets our platform hold up under load.
VP Product, Northwind
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