helped a friend set up a newsletter for her pottery shop yesterday. she's not technical, just wanted to send a nice email to like 200 people

We tried a few tools and honestly the experience was baffling. Drag and drop interfaces that fight you on every block placement. mobile previews that lie to your face. Pricing tiers designed by accountants on cocaine - congrats on your 201st subscriber, that'll be $30 now.

after way too much clicking around we just settled on yaplet cause it was the least painful option. she sent her first email in like 20 minutes and it actually looked decent on her phone. Low bar I know but here we are

Thing is - we obsess over every pixel in our products, a/b test button colors for weeks, argue about border-radius on pages nobody visits. Meanwhile millions of people are fighting email builders that haven't meaningfully improved in a decade. and these are the tools people actually use to make money.

feels like UX as a field just collectively decided email is someone else's problem and walked away

We're designing our marketing website, and our designer wants to incorporate animated illustrations, animated illustrations, motion graphics and subtle interactions throughout the experience.

The mockups look fantastic but our developer is convinced they'll hurt page speed, especially on mobile and ultimately reduce conversions. Both sides keep pointing to studies that support their argument so I'm struggling to figure out which approach is actually right.

Has anyone measured the impact of thoughtful motion design on landing page performance?