How to get micro-interactions right
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The short answer to micro-interactions is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Why it matters
Feedback on every action tells people the system heard them. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Animations over 300ms start to feel slow
- Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
What to do next
What this looks like day to day
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. 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 you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.