User experience is an important aspect of delivering a design that is effective in accomplishing its purpose. If an interface is confusing for users or if it is unable to guide the flow of browsing for users, it will be unable to accomplish its purpose. For this reason, when designing a UI, it is important to think about how users will interact with it and how they can use it to complete their purpose.
Microinteractions are an important part of user interface. It contributes to improving the experience of users when they interact with an interface. In simple words, microinteractions is a response to users’ interaction or feedback. When users interact with an interface, they must be given prompt feedback so they know what they can expect. Some microinteraction elements are common in our everyday use, for example, scrollbar on a web page or a swipe animation on a mobile app.
Why Microinteractions Are Important?
Microinteractions are important because it improves the user experience of a website or an app. Here is how it does that.
Status
Microinteractions are important for indicating the status of a website or an app in return to any action by users. For better UX, it is important to give more control and freedom to users. They should feel they are in control. For that, they should be aware of the current status of a website or an app. Some example of showing status through interactions are:
When a user clicks on a refresh a website, a loading animation is played to indicate the user that the website is currently reloading.
When a user uploads a file to a website, like Google Drive, a progress indicator is shown as a percentage of upload completed.
These were only a few examples microinteractions that are used to indicate the current status. Almost every website has some basic microinteractions for this purpose.
Error Prevention
Another important microinteraction use is in preventing errors. This can be done by allowing users to undo and preventing redo situation.
Sometimes when users are performing any action on a website or an app they make mistakes. In such cases, users should be able to undo their mistake. A common example of this is the ability to discard any item from a cart on an e-commerce store. Such microinteractions will prevent frustrations in users and hence deliver better UX.
Sometimes users make mistake and they have to redo it all over again. For example, when filling out a registration form, users might make mistake and has to fill the form again. This can be prevented by giving prompt response to users mistake so they don’t have to do it all over again.