7 Micro-Interactions to Improve User Experience

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As we all know, we always judge a book by its cover, and smart designers will create practical and attractive interfaces. Potential users may be attracted, but how to keep them glued?

To try to answer this question, everything points to human-centered design, where the user is the primary consideration. People-centered: Your app should use everyday language, including emotions, colloquialisms, and have a hint of "seduction" in appearance. The interface should be your good friend, always ready to give suggestions to improve your experience and make you smile.

Now for the reveal: microinteractions are at work. More precisely, these are mainly interactive animations that come with the interface, making it more expressive. Good animations can:

• Express status and provide feedback
• Improved direct control feel
• Visualize the results of your operations

In user experience, it’s all about how you treat your users and how they feel when they use your product. Even the smallest details deserve extra attention. Microinteractions provide the feedback users need and communicate what’s going on. They make the interface more approachable, no matter how complex the underlying logic is.

1. Display system status

Jakob Nielsen described it in the first revelation of the usability principle: Let users always know what is happening. Users want to get a response immediately, but there are always cases where the website needs a little time to wait for the operation to complete.

Then, the interface should display a graphic in the background that reflects the completion percentage. Or play a sound to let the user know what is happening. This principle also applies to file transfers: don't bore the user with a progress bar. Even unpleasant notifications, such as a transfer failure, should be presented in a pleasing way. Make your users smile!

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2. Highlight changes

Usually, to save space, apps will replace a button when needed. Sometimes we need to show a notification to make sure the user notices it. Animation can attract their attention and prevent them from ignoring the information you think is important.

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3. Keep context

In this age of smartphones and small-screen smartwatches, it’s hard to fit a lot of information on a screen. One way to deal with this is to keep navigation clear between pages. Let users understand where something came from so they can easily find their way back. There are a number of ways to do this:

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4. Non-standard layout

Continuing with the previous example, microinteractions should help users understand how to navigate a non-standard layout and remove unnecessary confusion. Sliding photos back and forth, scrolling charts, and rotating characters are all great options:

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5. Call to Action

In addition to helping users navigate the app efficiently, microinteractions also have the power to encourage users to continue browsing, liking, or sharing content simply because it’s so engaging that users won’t want to leave:

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6. Visualization of input

Data entry is one of the most important elements of any application. Data entry determines the quality of the results the user gets. Usually, this part is boring, but microinteractions can make it special:

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7. Make the tutorial vivid

Of course, after the app is released, animation can educate users. It highlights some basic functions and controls, eliminating obstacles for users in future use.

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in conclusion

So, if you value user experience, you should polish the interface from beginning to end, and enhance it with micro-interactions and animations. It will give life to your project.

Paying attention to every detail is the key to making human-computer interaction easy to use.