---
name: Shake
slug: shake-animation
category: motion
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A short lateral wobble used to reject an input, borrowed from the
  head shake and read as no rather than as an error message.
aliases:
  - name: error shake
  - name: wrong password shake
  - name: head shake
  - name: wobble
tags:
  - errors
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - jiggle-mode
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - inline-validation
    - haptic-feedback
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "School of Motion: motion design dictionary"
    url: https://schoolofmotion.com/blog/motion-design-dictionary
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: an input is refused and should be felt, not just read
---

A shake is a refusal expressed as motion. The control moves a few pixels left,
right, and back, two or three times, in under half a second, and lands exactly
where it started. Nobody has to read anything to know what happened, because the
gesture is the human head shake with the head taken out, and it arrives before
the eye has finished travelling to any text that came with it. The macOS login
window made it famous, and the pattern has been copied into every passcode
screen since.

The motion has strict limits. It has to be lateral, because a vertical wobble
reads as a bounce and a bounce reads as playful. It has to be short, because
anything past roughly 500ms stops being a reaction and starts being a complaint.
And the amplitude has to decay, so the last pass is smaller than the first: a
wobble of constant width reads as a mechanical loop rather than as something
recoiling. Because it returns to its origin and moves by transform, it costs no
layout at all and nothing around it shifts.

A shake is a reaction, not a status. It happens once, at the moment of the
rejection, and then it is gone, so it can never be the only thing that says an
attempt failed. Pair it with text that stays: an
[error message](/error-message) beneath the field, or
[inline validation](/inline-validation) that survives long enough to be read.
Motion is unavailable to anyone not looking at that part of the screen, and it is
switched off entirely for readers who ask for reduced motion, which is the
correct behaviour precisely because the shake was never carrying information the
words did not already carry.