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The Llama Farm Widget

Overview

Sprint health is one of the hardest things to make visible. Teams know their boards are full, but they don't feel the weight of it until something breaks. The Llama Farm was built to change that: a living widget where the state of your sprint shapes the behavior of an environment in real time.

Role

Team Lead, Motion Design

Product Strategy, Behavioral Logic, Interaction Design, Gamification.

Board

Llama widget

THE CONCEPT

Work as a Living System

Traditional dashboards describe sprint health. They don't make it perceptible.

We reframed sprint tracking as a system. Instead of displaying values, the product expresses state through behavior, turning progress into motion and imbalance into visible friction. Teams can read sprint health at a glance, without interpreting charts or metrics.

But a sprint board only works if people actually check it. In a product full of competing surfaces, the widget had to earn attention. Making it reactive, expressive, and alive wasn't decoration. It was the mechanism that made engagement sustainable.

Progress → Energy

Llamas move with more energy as tasks get completed.

Load → Density

Tasks create visible crowding

Stagnation → Decay

The environment begins to degrade

Completion → Recovery

Balance gradually returns

SYSTEM

Making hidden complexity visible

Sub-items often carry the real weight of a sprint, but remain invisible in traditional views.

To make that complexity perceptible, we translated underlying structure into visible character behavior, turning abstract task load into something teams could recognize instantly.

Interaction Design

Playful but Precise

While expressive, the system remains a functional tool. Users can interact directly with the environment, selecting, accessing, and editing tasks without leaving context.

  • Command Center: Select elements to reveal underlying data
  • Direct Management: Edit tasks within the visualization
  • The result: expressive, yet operational

SEASONAL THEMES

A System That Dresses for the Occasion

A living system should be able to respond to its context. We extended the widget with seasonal skins for the Super Bowl, Christmas, and Halloween, adapting the background and the llamas to match the moment. The logic stays the same. The world around it changes.

Super Bowl

Christmas

Halloween