Five mistakes teams make with micro-interactions

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit micro-interactions.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Feedback on every action tells people the system heard them
• Animations over 300ms start to feel slow
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Motion should clarify what changed, not decorate. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to do next

The short version

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.