Microinteractions

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” Starting from Charles Eames’s line, Dan Saffer, author of the book Microinteractions, argues that the difference between a good product and a great one lies in its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features.

How do you mute your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How do you change a setting? These little moments rarely appear on a feature list and are often ignored, yet they can turn a product that is tolerated into one that is beloved.

In this 2013 talk at an IxDA event, Saffer offers a way of thinking about digital products as a series of microinteractions that bring personality and delight to applications and devices. He covers the secret history of microinteractions and then their structure: triggers, rules, feedback and loops. Patterns such as Trigger and Input Feedback in the library cover parts of that structure.