A creative interaction can win you over in thirty seconds. The motion feels right, the timing is polished, and you can already imagine it improving the page you are building.
Installation is where that visual decision becomes a technical commitment.
Once the effect enters a project, you may also be accepting dependencies, input assumptions, rendering work, accessibility requirements, fallback behaviour, layout constraints, and maintenance responsibility. Some of those are trivial. Others can be enough to rule out an interaction before implementation begins.
That is why I think an interaction page needs to do more than demonstrate the strongest version of the effect. Before the install command, it should give a developer enough information to decide whether the interaction belongs in the project at all.
The important question is not only, "What does this look like?"
It is also, "What am I agreeing to if I use it?"
The information before installation has a different job
While working around Vault's effect catalogue, one part of the page structure I consider particularly important is the Overview.
The Overview should explain what the effect actually does and where that behaviour makes sense. A loader, page transition, cursor treatment, scroll sequence, navigation pattern, and WebGL hero might all be visually engaging, but they solve very different problems.
That context belongs before installation because it affects the adoption decision.
Detailed props, lifecycle notes, implementation guidance, source-level customisation, and optimisation techniques are still important, but presenting all of them before somebody has decided that the effect is relevant risks making discovery harder rather than easier.
I find it useful to separate the information into two layers.
The decision layer helps somebody answer, "Should I use this?"
The implementation layer helps them answer, "How do I make this work correctly in my project?"
The distinction sounds small, but it changes how documentation is organised. Instead of treating the install command as the beginning of the useful information, the page starts helping the developer make a technical judgement before anything enters the codebase.
A five-part pre-install check
For an interaction library, I think the information before installation can be organised around five questions.
1. What job does the interaction perform?
The first question is surprisingly easy to skip.
An effect should be understandable as more than a visual technique. What is it doing for the page?
A loader represents waiting. A page transition represents navigation between states. An accordion controls information disclosure. A cursor effect changes pointer feedback. A WebGL background may be primarily atmospheric.
That distinction matters because a technically impressive implementation can still be wrong for the page.
Numeric Tunnel, for example, makes more sense when there is a genuine wait to represent, such as an upload, asset preparation, data loading, or another operation that takes noticeable time. If the application is already usable almost immediately, introducing a large loader simply to create a moment for the animation would solve the wrong problem.
The first piece of pre-install information should therefore answer a basic product question: what role is this interaction expected to play?
2. What environment or input does it assume?
The next question concerns capability.
Some effects assume hover. Some assume a fine pointer. Some depend on scroll. Others assume that a WebGL context can run comfortably enough for the effect to justify itself.
These assumptions should be visible because they can change whether the interaction is relevant before any implementation work starts.
Vault currently has some preview experiences that tell the visitor when an effect is intended to be experienced on desktop. That is particularly useful for pointer-driven interactions where the desktop behaviour cannot simply be copied into a touch-first or coarse-pointer context.
The important distinction here is capability rather than device labels.
A touch-capable laptop can also have a trackpad or mouse. A tablet may have several input mechanisms available. Screen width alone does not tell us whether hover exists or whether the primary pointer is fine enough for the interaction.
For implementation decisions, concepts such as hover, pointer, any-hover, and any-pointer provide a more meaningful boundary than treating every "mobile" or "touch" environment as the same thing.
A good effect page does not need to teach those APIs before installation. It should, however, make the underlying assumption clear enough that a developer knows the interaction may need a different treatment in another input environment.
3. What does adoption add to the project?
Not every interaction carries the same implementation surface.
One effect might be mostly CSS and DOM behaviour. Another may depend on Motion or GSAP. A third may introduce Three.js, React Three Fiber, shaders, a canvas, and continuous rendering.
That difference matters before installation.
Vault uses effect-specific dependencies rather than requiring every project to inherit every engine represented in the catalogue. That keeps the dependency decision closer to the interaction that creates it.
From a documentation perspective, I think the same principle is useful: make the adoption cost visible where the adoption decision happens.
A developer does not necessarily need the full dependency graph before pressing install, but they should know when an interaction moves the project into a meaningfully heavier technical category.
Finding out after implementation that an effect requires a rendering stack the team does not want to support creates unnecessary rework.
4. What happens when the full interaction should not run?
This is where accessibility, reduced motion, mobile behaviour, and technical degradation become part of the same decision.
An interaction is much easier to adopt when the developer can understand what survives if the ideal version cannot or should not run.
For a pointer effect, the answer might be the native cursor.
For a complex animation under prefers-reduced-motion, the final readable state may appear immediately.
For a navigation interaction, keyboard accessibility and focus behaviour need to survive independently of the visual transition.
For WebGL, a static composition may preserve the art direction without requiring the renderer.
This does not mean every effect needs an elaborate fallback matrix above the install button. It means that when an interaction depends heavily on a particular capability, its fallback philosophy becomes part of its suitability.
If the only acceptable state is the full effect running exactly as shown in the preview, that is itself useful information for a production developer.
5. What could disqualify the interaction before installation?
The final question pulls the other four together.
What piece of information would make a developer decide not to use the effect?
It could be:
- the interaction depends on hover, but the important audience is primarily touch-first;
- the required dependency is not appropriate for the project;
- meaningful content becomes inaccessible without the animation;
- the fallback removes the part of the interaction that made it valuable;
- the rendering cost is difficult to justify for the page;
- the interaction assumes a layout or content model the project cannot guarantee.
This is where documentation can save the most wasted work.
The goal is not to make every effect look safer. It is to make it possible for the developer to reject the wrong effect early.
That is a useful outcome for a developer product.
The same framework produces very different answers
Consider two interactions that might both appear visually polished in a catalogue.
Numeric Tunnel
The page job is straightforward: it represents a wait state.
Its most important pre-install question is therefore not animation performance. It is whether the application has a wait that deserves this level of visual treatment and whether the progress being displayed corresponds to real application state.
If the operation cannot provide real percentage progress, the implementation may need an indeterminate or staged version instead. If the wait lasts only a fraction of a second, the correct decision may be not to use the loader at all.
Its adoption questions are primarily about state truthfulness, accessibility, and whether the interruption is justified.
Fractal Glass
A WebGL effect such as Fractal Glass produces a very different decision profile.
Here the developer needs to think about rendering capability, pixel density, continuous GPU work, mobile simplification, content placement, and fallback behaviour.
Device pixel ratio is not merely another configuration value. Rendering at a higher pixel density increases the number of pixels the GPU must process. A canvas rendered at twice the linear resolution contains roughly four times as many pixels. That can materially change the cost of an effect on higher-density displays.
Continuous rendering matters for a similar reason. A scene that keeps rendering while it is outside the viewport continues using resources without producing visible value.
Fractal Glass currently addresses these production concerns with measures including a DPR cap, reduced post-processing on mobile, offscreen pausing, meaningful HTML content outside the canvas, and the option of a static poster fallback.
Its pre-install questions are therefore much more about rendering cost, graceful degradation, and whether the live effect contributes enough to justify the runtime work.
The page architecture can remain consistent across Numeric Tunnel and Fractal Glass while the information inside that architecture changes substantially.
That is what standardisation should enable.
Standardisation should make differences easier to compare
Vault uses a standardised effect-page structure because consistency reduces the amount of navigation work required from the reader. Once somebody understands where the Overview, installation information, implementation guidance, performance notes, accessibility considerations, and other sections live, they can move through the catalogue more efficiently.
But standardisation should not make every effect appear equivalent.
A WebGL hero should carry different production considerations from an accordion.
A cursor interaction should surface different assumptions from a loader.
A route transition should care about different failure conditions from a background treatment.
The value of the shared structure is that those differences become easier to locate and compare.
For me, that is the more useful goal of standardised developer documentation: predictable structure, effect-specific judgement.
Where the install command should sit in the decision
I do not think the install command needs to be buried beneath a technical essay.
Creative tools should remain easy to explore. A developer who already understands the effect should be able to move quickly.
But ease of installation and quality of evaluation are not opposing goals.
Before installation, a concise page should be capable of answering:
- What does this interaction do?
- Where does it make sense?
- What capability or environment does it assume?
- What meaningful technical commitment comes with it?
- What happens when the ideal interaction is unavailable or inappropriate?
Everything else can become progressively more detailed after that.
- Props belong later.
- Advanced tuning belongs later.
- Lifecycle mechanics can belong later.
- Deep implementation notes can belong later.
The decision to adopt the interaction comes first.
A useful effect page should make rejection possible
There is a tendency in product pages to optimise every piece of information toward continuing the funnel.
For developer tools, I think there is another useful outcome: helping somebody decide quickly that a particular implementation is not right for their project.
- Maybe the dependency is unnecessary.
- Maybe the input model does not match.
- Maybe the accessible fallback removes too much of the interaction's value.
- Maybe the page simply does not need that much motion.
That is not failed product communication. It is informed adoption.
An effect library becomes easier to trust when its documentation helps developers exercise judgement instead of assuming that installation is always the desired outcome.
The question I would put to developers who regularly evaluate animation and interaction packages is this:
When you evaluate an interaction for production, what information can disqualify it before you install it: input assumptions, dependencies, accessibility fallback, rendering cost, framework constraints, or something else?
I suspect the answers differ considerably between creative developers, agency teams, product engineers, and people maintaining large applications. That difference is exactly why the information before installation matters.
