Micro-interactions: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about micro-interactions this quarter, make it the first item below.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Start here

Feedback on every action tells people the system heard them. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Then this

Animations over 300ms start to feel slow. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Eventually

Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about micro-interactions before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Animations over 300ms start to feel slow — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.