We are welcoming Cyd Stumpel to talk on "Prefers Enhanced Motion" at FFConf 2026.

We wanted to also thank Cyd for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know them a little bit more before Friday 13th November.

About Cyd and their talk

• Title: Prefers enhanced motion

• About the talk: The way most creative developers experience the web is completely different from how most users experience it. For us it's a place to experiment, a technical challenge or a creative playground. For most users it's "just" a tool to get things done and the really uncomfortable part is, that some of the things we add to make websites "better", are actively making that harder.

  Sometimes it can feel like we're designing experiences for ourselves and just hoping that users can keep up. This talk shows you how to responsibly add enhancements to your websites.

• Cyd's origin story: I got so obsessed with proving I actually knew what I was doing that I accidentally became a conference speaker and a university teacher.

The warm up questions

What's something on the web right now that delights you every single time, no matter how small?

Page transitions are my favourite thing and obsession, not the full page overlay thingies, but animating content from one page to another. It's why I've jumped so quickly on the View Transitions API, much less hassle than having to do it with JavaScript and virtual routing.

I think it can be such a lovely way to show users how pages are connected and it also shows a lot of eye for detail from a (motion) design perspective, in my view. You really need to think about what you're going to be able to animate, during the design process and adjust your designs before it gets to the build phase.

If you could ban one "enhancement" from every website overnight, what's going first? (mine would be scroll jacking!)

(AI) Chatbots is the first answer that comes to mind, no one wants to talk to a robot. But, from a frontend point of view, I would ban scroll-driven text animations immediately if I had the power. Text animations should nearly always be scroll-triggered, and they should trigger before you reach the part of the page so you're never left with a half empty page on scrolling.

About the work and the talk

In your origin story, it said that you got so obsessed with proving yourself that you accidentally ended up speaking and teaching. How did that happen (to teaching part, not the obsessing part!)?

I completed a minor in Web Design & Development; it is one of the most intense programs at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The workload is high, as are the expectations, but a lot of the teachers were actually also freelance developers, still working in the field, and they truly knew what they were talking about. I arrived feeling insecure, with minimal knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I was eager to prove that I could handle it. Without this minor, I wouldn't be where I am today.

A few years ago, I ran into my lecturers again at a conference; they wanted to hire a creative developer for a new frontend-specific program and asked if I would be interested. That was when my drive to prove myself resurfaced, and what was supposed to be a six-month project has turned into three years of teaching.

Your talk points at an uncomfortable gap between how we experience the web and how everyone else does. When did that gap first become obvious to you?

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew it, but the Creative Developer scene is kind of notorious for ignoring performance and accessibility over aesthetics and animation. Most of us in that scene are able-bodied and have the newest, most high-end devices. Plus (and this is one of the things that's really awkward) clients that want websites like that don't really care about accessibility and are definitely not willing to pay for it, they often don't even care that websites like that usually don't convert at all. It's all for cool points.

It wasn't until I started to work as a teacher and followed some of the lectures by my colleague, Krijn Hoetmer, that I really started to understand how elegant it is to develop with Progressive Enhancement in mind, and how it creates a better experience for everyone.

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Find out more about Cyd online on their website or BlueSky.

Join us in November to see Cyd's talk: 2026.ffconf.org