Case Study: Walmart achieves expressive, lightweight AI assistant animations with LottieFiles

Walmart brings Sparky to life with LottieFiles using 20KB animations

Walmart sought to reimagine its brand and evolve its legacy Smiley character into a modern AI-powered shopping assistant named Sparky. The challenge was to create a character that felt responsive, empathetic, and alive with rich, expressive motion, all while ensuring optimal performance at scale within its mobile app. To achieve this, Walmart partnered with LottieFiles and used the Lottie animation format.

LottieFiles provided a solution through its scalable and flexible Lottie format, enabling the creation of a library of over 60 fluid animations. Each Lottie file averaged only 20-30KB, which is about 10% the size of a GIF equivalent, ensuring smooth playback and optimized app performance. This resulted in faster stakeholder approval cycles due to high-quality previews and allowed developers to easily integrate the files, including hidden interactive easter eggs, strengthening Walmart's brand personality.

Walmart