Why Are Microinteractions So Crucial for UI/UX Design?

Since UX design is all about usability and visual appeal to the user, it’s critical to polish all minor details and intricacies of your app’s interface to achieve stellar UX. This is achievable via the proper design of microinteractions – the subtle details that improve your app’s usability and intuitiveness. A qualified SaaS website design agency can tailor numerous microinteractions in your app to help you achieve the “wow” effect and surprise your users. Here is everything you need to know about this UX design element, how it works, and how you can add it to your UX design.

Introduction to Microinteractions

Let’s start from the basics. What are microinteractions overall, and how do they improve your UX? This term stands for small interface reactions to in-app user actions. These microinteractions act as instant feedback providers and encourage user engagement through a positive experience with the UI. Besides, microinteractions do magic by enhancing UX and making interactions with the app fun while the user actually stays on task.

By carefully planning and executing these interactive elements, designers can significantly enhance user satisfaction and foster a deeper connection with the app. A proficient team offering product strategy services will ensure that every microinteraction resonates with the brand’s vision and user expectations, ultimately driving the app’s success. Whether it’s the app’s loading screen, a button click, or an error notification, these microinteractions add value to your UX design.

With all these benefits in mind, you will surely want to add some fancy microinteractions to your app’s design. Also, you’ll be pleased to know that microinteractions add humanity to design and help you define your users’ behavior by directing them to more desirable actions.

Why Are They Important?

As we’ve already said, microinteractions improve user experience in many ways and enhance your app’s UI and UX appeal. Besides these perks, animated microinteractions are super handy in guiding the users through the UI navigation and familiarizing them with the core app features. Users also feel rewarded after testing the microinteractions and finalizing their actions successfully. So, you can’t go wrong by implementing these subtle details into your UX design.

Microinteractions in Practice

Every experienced UX designer should master four key ingredients of a successful microinteraction design. They include:

• A trigger that urges the user to scroll, pull, tap, or click on the specific UI controls to perform a specific action. In other words, the trigger initiates a particular microinteraction.
• Once the trigger is activated, something happens in the app. What it will be is indicated by the system’s rules that a designer should specify in the app’s code.
• Feedback is the outcome of the microinteraction. It can be a change of color, a notification, some fancy animation, or any other change of visual presentation that will inform your user that they have successfully completed an action. Here, you can let your imagination and creativity fly high to design the feedback form.
• The designers should also set specific loops and modes for meta-rules in the app for specific microinteractions. This part of the microinteraction notifies the users about the need to switch to the new mode and specifies the duration of the interaction as such.

Best Design Practices for Microinteractions

Now it’s time to get down to practice and consider the best design practices for creating microinteractions in contemporary apps. The core task of a designer is to make microinteractions predictable and intuitive, thus urging the users to get accustomed to them pretty quickly and engage in those actions on a repeated basis with time. Some workable examples of effective microinteractions include:

• Swiping. UX research suggests swiping is much more convenient than tapping, as it allows easier switching between tabs. Besides, a swipe is a more natural, ergonomic gesture for a person holding a smartphone in one hand, so it’s much more fun and addictive than other microinteractions.
• Inputting data. Spice up your data input section with fancy, engaging animations to increase the likelihood of your users’ completion of the registration or checkout process. This microinteraction will keep your users entertained and comfortable using your product.
• Adding a CTA to the app raises the users’ interest in performing the intended action and gives them a positive reward after they finalize the action. This way, users are more motivated to return and perform this action again.
• Animation. Animation is the best way to make your app more human and addictive, as the animated buttons and tabs are much more attention-grabbing. The animated design thus improves UX manifold and makes user interactions fun.
• System status updates. It’s vital to keep the user continuously updated about the status of their activities in the app, as guesswork is not the modern user’s cup of tea. The absence of timely updates can make a user leave and throw the app into a trash bin, so your task is to equip all in-app activities with the current system status notifications. This way, you’re sure to give a more pleasurable experience and give a user an ultimate sense of control.
• Educational content. Tutorials go hand in hand with microinteractions to improve users’ experiences. A well-designed tutorial should explain how microinteractions work and introduce users to the core functionality, thus giving them a full walkaround and an idea of how they can engage in certain in-app actions.

The list may go on infinitely as UX designers experiment with additional microinteractions today and engage users in a variety of ways. You can use various combos of these microinteractions in your app design, but don’t go too far in the saturation of your product with fancy design details. Sometimes too much animation and interactivity may overwhelm the user and cause a cognitive overload instead of pleasurable UX.

Don’t Neglect the Power of Microinteractions in Your UX Design

As you can see, microinteractions are the secret sauce that adds humanity, interactivity, and fun to your users’ interactions with your product, thus ensuring a positive overall UX. Well-designed microinteractions serve as handy onboarding tools for new users and also train specific desirable actions that your users will be stimulated to perform. As a result of applying microinteractions design, you can set up a habit loop much faster, letting your users perform the intended actions and be rewarded with immediate feedback. So, we recommend adding microinteractions to your UX design combo and reaping the benefits of this design approach in the form of higher customer engagement and satisfaction.