Book review: Microinteractions-designing with details by Dan Saffer
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
We all experience some form of Microinteractions (“MI”) every day in our routines. For example,
Have you ever felt tickling sense of vibration on your fingers when you keyed in the wrong password or drew the wrong pattern to unlock your mobile phone?.
If your answer is yes, you have experience a form of MI.
Microinteractions are the functional interactive details of a product that allows us to engage with the product in a more easier and pleasurable manner even if we consciously don’t remember them.
MI is good to be applied for :
- Accomplishing a single task.
- Connecting devices together.
- Interacting with a single piece of data (for example temperature or stock prices).
- Controlling ongoing feature or function
This book dives in-depth on the guiding principles of designing a good MI.
What’s the content like ?
The book focuses on four important parts of MI which is :
1. Trigger that initiates MI
A trigger is the physical or digital control or condition(s) that begins a MI. This chapter explains on the difference between user initiated trigger and system trigger. The three guiding principles to design a trigger is :
i) To understand what a user wants (or needs) to do, when they want to do it, and in what context(s) they want to do it.
ii) Have the trigger initiate the same action every time in order for users to shape a mental model on how MI works.
iii) Bring the data forward. What are the most valuable pieces of information I can show when the trigger is initiated? . For example when you received a miss call on your mobile phone, the phone app indicates the number of miss call as per snapshot below:
2. Rules that determines how MI functions
Before designing the rules ,the most important part is to determine the clearest and simplest goal of the MI. The goal define should be for the end state and not in between the process.
Every object in MI has characteristics and states which is defined by rules.
A simple drop-down menu has two states: open and closed. When the menu is open, it reveals its options, which are some of its characteristics. It could have characteristics such as maximum number of options or the length of the labels presented in the options.
All of these details should be defined by the rules.
3. Feedback that the rules generate
Feedback aims to help users to understand how the rules of MI works such as when a user reaches an edge cases of a rule. For example, a case of when an error is about to occur such as keying in the wrong value (e.g. password) into a field.
One of the main principle of feedback it to not to overburden users with feedback. Feedback should be driven by need.
The two essential questions that designers need to pose is :
i) What does a user needs to know ?
ii) When and how often do they need to know ?
4. Loops and modes that make up its meta-rules.
Modes should be used sparingly because there is less chance for users to be confused what mode they are in and they do not need to relearn how MI works. One of the most common mode is the settings mode where user specifies something about MI.
A loop is a cycle that repeats, usually for a set duration such as check if there is network connectivity 10 times before giving an error message.
Loops are used to make sure an action doesn’t go on too long or end a process.
What did I learn from the book ?
- Rapidity and effortless is what MI strives for the user.
- Clear set of goals needs to be define in order to design MI.
- A good measure on the success of MI relies on bulk of usability testing involving more than hundreds or thousand of participants.
- Don’t start from zero. Collect or utilize existing data such as type of device , location , battery life or time of day that will be helpful to understand user’s context of use and behavior . These data can be potentially brought forward as a trigger.
- Never collect data that shames, endanger or embarrass users. It’s better to have a depersonalize experience than one that fraught with fear of exposure.
- Hick’s law also applies in MI where options should be limited and smart defaults is the ideal MI.
Would I recommend this book ?
Yes for designers who are interested in creating a better product.
Be prepared to digest lots of information as this is not an easy read.
You would also need to sketch some MI either on paper or on your head in order to understand some MI examples detailed by the author.
It can be quite difficult to follow the flow until you read the context of certain paragraphs because there is no clear distinction between the headers and sub headers.
Overall, this book provides a good details on all the aspects that needed to be taken account of when it comes to designing a good MI.
