Microinteractions

In today’s day and age, it’s imperative to create a fun, minimalist, user-friendly, functional and attractive design for the entire User Experience. Micro-interactions are subtle details that create a profound, holistic interactive experience for the users.

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Here is how you can create a fun connection between your product and your end-user cleverly through micro-interactions, to deliver the best UX.

Let us take a broader look at the 4 types of micro-interactions and see how we can improve on them.

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Trigger- also known as Call to Action (CTA)

As we know, Triggers are used to initiate a micro-interaction. A trigger could be a floating icon to encourage the click, swipe, tap, pull, scroll. Since they are initiating actions, it is preferable to design the trigger in a simplistic manner. A simple design increases the chance for your users to feel comfortable. The simplicity factor assures the user that the following content will not confuse them or land them on a page with too many complicated choices. 

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Rules

Rules determine what happens once a micro-interaction is triggered. You provide visual information to your users and direct them to a process which completes the action. Now since you need to engage your users, the directions need to be very simple, logical and focused, like a target. Help the users naturally get to desired outcomes with ease. Make sure the whole process is relevant and matches the functionality of the particular micro-interaction. 

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Feedback

Feedback acts as a guide to the user to let them know where they stand in their user journey. Since feedback is nothing but information to the user, it’s best to use typically informative animation and designs that give them confidence in your guidance. Use minimal but informative designs that draw their attention to the given information. 

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Loops

Loops are a way to complete a given life cycle of a process or action within a given time. Hence, loops can have very attractive colourful designs to make the user feel happy and content at the end of the reaction chain. A loop will continue if it’s a recurring action, or else it will change if the equation of the interaction changes. 

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We can use micro-interactions in many ways and complete its purpose. The various features of micro-interactions like recommendations, easy completion of the task, enhancing navigation and interactions, attract direct user’s attention. They are key to making a transparent, well guided and most importantly pleasing user experience. Hence it is imperative to create designs to psychologically please a user, even at a subconscious level. 

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To do so, there are certain points we as responsible UX designers should keep in mind:

Design

1. Use Minimal Design.
2. Using specific Icons and animation.
3. Using mood-based acknowledgement- ‘happy for completion’, ‘sad for error’ etc. Colours play a great role in defining the status of the action.  
4. Everything on your micro interactor should reflect your brand guidelines and keep the design true to the nature of your brand. 

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Functionality

1. Smartly plan your micro-interactions, try not to overdo or stuff too many micro-interactions designs to avoid clutter or confusion.
2. Try to have a quick response time of the micro-interactions to spring to action, typically make sure it doesn’t take more than 0.1 secs to manifest or users might not be able to connect.
3. You might want to consider pre-testing how the micro-interactions behave before you launch it.
4. Make sure your micro-interactions have complete functionality and solve the purpose of its action. (CTA)

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Experience

1. Consider the fact that there might be users who aren’t used to the features of your micro-interaction (first-time users) so try and provide clarity and keep it simple and consistent. 
2. Make your micro-interactions natural to the users to make them the most user friendly.
3. Sometimes there is a waiting period involved, try and keep the micro-interactions entertaining and informative.

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Conclusion

Attention to details is the key for most successful ventures and micro-interactions are those exciting details. Thus, being a responsible UX designer, don’t get too carried away, rather keep it simple, minimalist and pleasurable.