Getting started with micro-interactions
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to micro-interactions for teams who have not touched it before.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What is actually at stake
Feedback on every action tells people the system heard them. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Animations over 300ms start to feel slow
- Change one thing and measure it
Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
The short version
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
- Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.