Micro Interactions, When And How To Use Them For Enhanced UX.

4 min readOct 17, 2020

What are Micro interactions?

Micro interactions are small moments where the user and design interact. When they are well designed, micro interactions enhance the user’s experience with the design. When they are poorly designed, they damage the experience.

This animation is a great example of micro-interaction because it delivers three important functions:

• Communicating status and giving feedback

• Improving the sense of direct movement

• Helping Out people to see the outcomes of their actions

Micro interactions have four parts:

• Triggers commence a micro interaction. Triggers can be user-initiated, or system initiated.

In a user-initiated trigger, the user must begin an action.

In a system-initiated trigger, computer software identifies specific criteria are being met and starts an action.

• Rules decide what happens once a micro interaction is started.

• Feedback lets people know what is going on. Everything a user sees, listen to, or feels while a micro interaction is going on is feedback.

• Loops and Modes define the meta-rules of the micro interaction. What happens to a micro interaction when situations change?

Why do Micro Interaction matter? Motion for Emotion :)

If micro interactions are only small design elements, why should we be concerned about them?

Sadly, lots of web developers and designers yet ask such a question, not understanding that neglecting micro interactions may result in bad UX experience. Attention to details is what essentially differs an extraordinary website from ordinary one.

Here is why micro interactions rock:

• They enhance a website navigation

• They make it simpler for users to interact with your website

• They deliver instant and appropriate feedback about a finalized action to a user

• They give instructions to your users

• They convey information about some elements, like whether it is interactive

• They make the user experience much more rewarding

• They encourage sharing, liking, and commenting on your content

• They direct users’ attention

• And, finally, they just make your site more emotional

Well-designed micro interactions are a clear sign of a care of a user. That’s why they value so much. A user gets what to do and whether their action was correct and approved by the system — an app or website provide an immediate visual feedback and teach a user to work with the system.

When micro interactions are done perfectly, they can give encouraging thoughts about your brand and influence users’ actions, often without people even recognizing why. If you like or disapprove one aspect of a product, you have a positive or negative tendency toward the product in general. In wise hands, this knowledge can help to improve a user’s feedback from your website — by paying proper attention to details, it is possible to leave your users satisfied.

When to use them?

Swipe

The Swipe action reduces tapping and is much more interactive and smoother. It helps the user immediately switch between the tabs and gather more knowledge about the product. Moreover, swiping is a very popular gesture and leads the users subconsciously without making them think; just like we have been reading ‘Don’t make your users think’. What more? It is insanely fun and addictive.

Animations

Animation simply allows and enhances micro-interactions. They represent good design; their existence might not be observed but non-existence takes a toll on everyone. They act like a gum that helps designers make the simplest of processes exciting and addictive. But be very sensitive as they are designed to engage the users and not confuse or frustrate them. Late processing or introducing new style in website might create confusion.

Animated Buttons

They play the role of information manager by letting the user know their way through your app or site. We need to pay attention to color, shape, special effects, animations, placement and texture to make the user experience seamless.