Let’s imagine you’re playing a game on your tablet. When you tap a button, a small animation or sound might happen to let you know that your action was successful. That’s a microinteraction! It’s a small, quick response that tells you something happened.

It’s everywhere in the things we use every day. For example, when you send a message on a chat app, you might see little bubbles that appear to show the message is being sent. Or when you unlock your phone, you might hear a sound and see an animation as the screen lights up. These are all examples of microinteractions that make the experience more enjoyable and informative.

Microinteractions can also make things more fun. Think about using a digital pet toy. When you pet it or feed it, you might see it make a happy face or hear it make a sound. These reactions make you feel more connected to the toy and make the experience more engaging.

So, microinteractions are like the small, special moments that happen when we interact with something. They make our experience better, help us know what’s going on, and sometimes add a touch of excitement or fun.

The Role of Microinteractions in UX Design

For this post, let’s explore the role of microinteractions in UX design and how they can enhance user engagement, delight, and satisfaction.

Enhancing Usability

Enhancing usability is one of the primary roles of microinteractions in UX design. It provide immediate feedback to users, helping them understand the outcome of their actions and making the overall experience more user-friendly and intuitive.

Imagine you’re using a mobile app to order food. When you tap the “Add to Cart” button for an item, a microinteraction can show a small animation or change the color of the button to indicate that the item has been successfully added. This visual feedback reassures you that your action was recognized and gives you confidence that the item is now in your cart.

Similarly, when you tap on a link or a button on a website, a microinteraction can create a subtle change in the appearance, such as a highlight or a color change, to let you know that the button has been pressed and the action is being processed. This immediate feedback prevents confusion and frustration by providing a clear indication that your action has been acknowledged by the system.

Guiding User Behavior

Let’s imagine you’re using a fitness app. When you complete a workout session, a microinteraction can display a congratulatory message or show a progress bar that fills up to indicate your achievement. This positive reinforcement encourages you to continue exercising and reach your fitness goals. By providing visual cues that highlight progress and accomplishment, it motivates users to engage in desired behaviors and stay committed to their fitness routine.

Microinteractions can also be used to gently steer users towards specific actions or features. For instance, when you log into a music streaming app, you might see a microinteraction suggesting a personalized playlist based on your listening history. This recommendation guides you to discover new music and engage with the app’s features, increasing your overall satisfaction and involvement with the platform.

Adding Delightful Details

Adding delightful details is an essential aspect of microinteractions in UX design. These small, thoughtful interactions can elevate the user experience and create moments of delight and engagement.

Microinteractions can also personalize the user experience, adding a sense of uniqueness and personality. For instance, in a messaging app, you might have the option to select different chat themes. When you change the theme, it can smoothly transition the color palette or background image, making the experience more personalized and visually appealing.

In gaming applications, microinteractions are often used to enhance the overall experience and make it more immersive. For instance, when you score a point or achieve a milestone in a game, a microinteraction can trigger celebratory animations, sounds, or visual effects. These delightful details make you feel a sense of accomplishment and increase your motivation to continue playing.

Communicating System Status

Communicating system status means letting users know what is happening with the device, app, or website they are using. It’s like giving them updates or information about what the system is doing. 

Imagine you’re playing a video game on your computer, and you click a button to start a level. While the level is loading, you might see a spinning wheel or a progress bar. This is the system communicating to you that it’s working on getting the level ready. It’s like a little message telling you, “Hey, hold on a moment, I’m getting things ready for you!”

Communicating system status is important because it helps users understand what’s happening and keeps them informed. It prevents confusion and frustration because you know that the system is doing its job and not just ignoring your actions.

Encouraging User Engagement

Microinteractions provide immediate feedback to users when they perform an action. For example, when you click a button on a website, a microinteraction can display a visual change or animation to confirm that the button has been pressed. This feedback reassures users that their action was recognized, creating a sense of responsiveness and encouraging them to further engage with the interface.

Secondly, microinteractions can add delightful details and elements of surprise to the user experience. By incorporating playful animations, sound effects, or unexpected interactions, it creates moments of joy and captivate users’ attention. These delightful details enhance the overall experience, making it more enjoyable and encouraging users to explore further. 

Microinteractions can also guide users through tasks or processes, helping them navigate and understand the interface. For example, when you fill out a form on a website, it can provide real-time validation or highlight errors to guide you in completing the form accurately. This guidance reduces friction and encourages users to actively engage with the interface, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying experience.

Balancing Simplicity and Complexity

Balancing simplicity and complexity is a crucial aspect of microinteractions in UX design. It involves finding the right level of complexity to ensure that interactions are easy to understand and use, while still providing depth and functionality to meet user needs.

By balancing simplicity and complexity, microinteractions can cater to different user skill levels and needs. They provide a user-friendly experience for beginners, ensuring accessibility and ease of use, while also offering deeper layers of functionality for more experienced or demanding users. This balance helps create a versatile and inclusive user experience that accommodates a wide range of user preferences and levels of expertise.

Conclusion

In conclusion, microinteractions play a crucial role in enhancing the overall user experience in UX design. These small, subtle interactions have the power to make or break a user’s perception of an app or website. By paying attention to details such as button animations, loading indicators, and error messages, designers can create a seamless and enjoyable user journey. Microinteractions not only provide feedback to users but also establish a sense of trust and reliability in the product. Therefore, it is essential for designers to give careful thought to these interactions and ensure they align with the overall design goals. So, next time you embark on a UX design project, remember the power of microinteractions and use them wisely to create memorable experiences for your users.

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What is UI/UX?

The terms user interface and user experience are often referred to as UI/UX. While this is a broad term, it can be categorised into two parts: 

User Interface (UI) – The way users interact with your product or service is known as UI. This covers elements like the buttons on your website, the simplicity of your site’s navigation, and whether or not there are any loading times when they click something.

User Experience (UX) – This refers to the overall experience that a user has when interacting with a website or application. It takes into account factors such as usability, accessibility, and the emotional response elicited by the design. 

How UI/UX Increases User Engagement

UI/UX helps businesses create a more seamless interaction between customers and their products by ensuring that every part of a company’s website or app is intuitively designed to simplify things for users. 

UI/UX also enables businesses to personalise experiences based on each individual’s needs and preferences—for example, if you’re shopping for shoes online but only want black ones (not blue), you should be able to filter out all other colors from your search results!

The Role of UI/UX in Businesses

 A study by Forrester Research found that while a strong user interface (UI) might boost a website’s conversion rate by 200%, a great user experience (UX) could boost it by almost 400%. In businesses, the role of UI/UX is to gain a competitive advantage, achieve goals faster, and increase customer loyalty.

UI/UX helps you achieve these goals by designing an experience that differentiates your product or service from the rest of the market.

The Benefits of UI/UX for Businesses

• Improves User Satisfaction

An effective and valuable user experience gives a company a significant competitive advantage in attracting and retaining customers. When a website or mobile app is built with the user in mind, it is easier for a brand to establish trust and convert them into customers. Users will return if they find your website easy to use and highly customised to their needs.

• Increases User Engagement

UI/UX design also increases user engagement. In addition to attracting new users or preventing user frustration, creating a good interface that simplifies exploration and navigation will encourage users to continue their digital experience. Optimising your platform’s UI/UX creates an experimental environment for your customers to interact with your solutions. This results in higher client retention and conversion rates.

• Increase Brand Integrity

A well-designed UI/UX can also help businesses improve their brand image. An interface that is both visually appealing and user-friendly can give users a positive first impression and create a perception of professionalism and quality. Customers feel at ease as soon as they recognise your brand colours and logos. When your website or app provides the same experience that your brand intends, your brand identity becomes more firmly established. This can result in long-term customer loyalty and repeat sales.

• Reduces Development Costs

While it may appear contradictory, investing in UI/UX design can help businesses save money in the long run. Because the development process is streamlined and requires fewer modifications, a well-designed interface can reduce development costs. Having a well-designed interface from the start can help avoid rebuilding the product due to problems such as fixing navigational errors or removing unnecessary features and functions. A good UI/UX design can reduce product development costs significantly.

• Supports SEO

Lastly, UI/UX design can assist businesses in enhancing their SEO (search engine optimisation). A well-designed interface can increase a website’s search engine ranking because search engines like Google consider user experience when ranking. This is because both UI/UX and SEO have the same goal of helping users achieve the best results in terms of user engagement. An effective UI/UX design can affect organic search ranking, resulting in higher site traffic and revenue for a business.

Conclusion

UI/UX design is a crucial element of a successful digital product. In addition to increasing user satisfaction and engagement, it also improves brand image, reduces development costs, and boosts SEO. Businesses that invest in UI/UX design can stay competitive and continue to satisfy the evolving needs of their customers. On the other hand, businesses that fail to incorporate UI/UX into their digital presence risk losing customers to competitors with more usable and trustworthy websites. 

It is therefore critical to work with an experienced design agency and consider UI/UX design as an important part of the development process. Work with Creativ Digital’s expert UI and UX designers to create an intuitive, user-centred website that accelerates your company’s growth and sales. Contact us today to develop amazingly intuitive solutions that strengthen your brand, spur adoption, and promote sustainable growth.

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It’s not that web designers have suddenly lost all talent, or that the quality of content has plummeted. It’s that the browsing journey itself is being increasingly broken.

The Wicker Man Website

Web designers know that personalization works, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a business that knows their name and can recommend products based on their previous purchase history, and they know that data is needed to fuel their personalization efforts.

However, in an attempt to increase their harvest of personal data, web designers are burning alive the sacrificial lamb of UX, inside a wicker man constructed of engagement and personalization tactics.

Far from the desired increased user engagement and conversions, the result is often detachment and frustration as the user has to fight off an onslaught of invasive content – content that is neither helpful or wanted.

Accessing a Website in 2020

Being able to browse uninterrupted is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. The frustrating journey below is a much more likely experience.

1. Access website
2. Close interstitial
3. Okay, I’ll accept cookies
4. I suppose I can allow you to use my location
5. No, I don’t want to receive any push notifications
6. Huh? No, I don’t want to live chat with a member of your team
7. No, I’m not interested in downloading your free e-book
8. Nope, I don’t want to follow your company on Twitter
9. No, I’m not willing to take part in a survey to rate your website
10. Forget it, I’ll go back to watching videos of cats falling off washing machines

The Intelligence Paradox

Although some designers are more guilty than others, there’s an increasingly common problem: the more intelligent the tools at a web designers disposal, the more unintelligent their application.

The roots of the fragmented modern browsing journey can be traced back to the recent personalization boom. The fuel is consumer demand and advancing smart technology.

Personalized User Experience

There’s no getting away from the fact that tailoring content and marketing to each visitor works. Businesses want to create a personalized online experience that is welcoming and helpful to each individual user. To achieve this, they need smart technology.

Smart Technology

The progression of AI and improved e-commerce software has been instrumental in companies being able to get more personal with their users. Accessing a website now is more akin to entering a physical store than ever before. You’re greeted when you enter and can chat with a salesperson whenever you need assistance.

This isn’t a bad thing. Websites are more intelligent and responsive – they can locate what we are looking for more efficiently than ever before.

The problem is that businesses are going too far. In attempting to create an engaging and personalized user experience, many websites are instead delivering an encroaching and annoying browsing journey.

The Cringey Salesman

Have you ever been inside a mobile phone store? The chain stores where you are immediately pounced on by an intrusive salesperson. Despite your protestations that you’re only looking, they are never more than six feet away, trying to catch your eye at every opportunity, and offering you a deal if you spend more than 25 seconds looking at any phone.

You leave feeling slightly more dirty than when you entered, convince yourself your old Motorola will last another year and vow never to return the store again.

This experience isn’t far removed from the browsing journey of many websites heavily invested in personalization. You are confronted by a series of permission requests, invitations to live chat, and pop-ups. It’s a cacophony of ads and banners that requires ninja-like clicking skills to resume your browsing with minimal interruption.

The Need For Balance

Striking the perfect balance of engagement without overstepping the mark to annoyance is difficult. The benefits of engagement are plain to see. A well-placed pop up can see conversion rates of up to 50.2%, while live chat invitations can offer a high ROI of 105%.

The key is to deliver engagement tactics at the right time, in the proper context, and with relevant content. The danger is that when a tactic delivers results, it’s tempting to implement similar tactics at every opportunity and across your whole website. Targeting user’s every click and scroll.

That’s when the line between engagement and annoyance is crossed.

How to Get Personalization Right

GDPR has brought data protection into the minds of the mainstream and could be hugely beneficial for UX. Consumer data can only be processed if necessary and stored for just as long as is necessary.

This presents an opportunity to overhaul both the permissions you request, and how you go about requesting them.

Users aren’t surprised and put off by personalization techniques if they remember giving you their permission in the first place. Unbundle your permission requests and make it clear what users are agreeing to. People are more likely to agree to your location request if they understand that it means they will receive promotions and offers that are dependent on their location.

Don’t harass users with permission requests and push notifications within seconds of them landing on your site. Prove your value first. The onus is on you to prove you’re worth people’s time before you start pushing your content and promotions.

The Double-edged Sword of Pop-ups

Pop-ups can be incredibly annoying. Ethan Zuckerman, the inventor of the pop-up, has even apologized to the world for his contribution to global web annoyance. That being said, they can also be extremely effective.

The best performing pop-ups appear when a user is already engaging with your content. Schedule pop-ups to appear after 60% of the average user page session duration. This time period allows users to explore your site interruption free and pique their interest – without you delaying too long and losing out on engaged prospects.

A pop up with some random offer or promotion isn’t going offer any value to users. Your content needs to be relevant to the page the user is viewing. If a user is looking at a page of lawnmowers, a pop-up promoting a blender isn’t going to be very helpful.

Live Chat

Live chat is a great way to open up a dialogue with prospects, a dialogue that can be very profitable. Visitors that chat are worth 4.5x more than visitors that don’t. However, you don’t want to be a cringey salesman. Don’t try and force live chat with an invitation pop-up on every page and after every other user click.

People don’t want to be met with the same generic automated chat invitation on every page they visit, especially when they can see your live chat button for themselves at the bottom of the page.

Think like a helpful salesman, not a cringey one. Only offer invitations to live chat when it could help the user. Someone that’s been looking at a product’s specifications for 5 minutes is far more likely to want assistance than a prospect that only landed on a page 10 seconds ago.

Conclusion

Web designers walk a fine line between user engagement and user enragement. Many websites have failed to find the right balance between personalization efforts and UX. The above best practices are a step in the right direction to restoring some equilibrium to your site.

When users spend more time clicking off content they don’t want than clicking on the content they do, the result is frustration. Personalization works, it’s just that you won’t have any users to engage if you keep on annoying them.

The post Personalization Gone Wrong: User Enragement and The Wicker Man Website appeared first on Creativ Digital.

However, digital touch points are always evolving. What’s trendy today might not been vogue tomorrow. This is why it is important to know UX trends.

Important UX Designs That Are Trending

Here are some very important UX trends you need to know about to improve your guest experience and to market your website or product better.

Password-less Logins

Accordign to a Cyclonic Password Security Survey, 27.95% of users forget their passwords more than 10 times per year. This problem is mainly due to password protection protocols that require users to add special characters for a stronger password. While these features beef up security, it only makes password creation and memorization more complicated.

A simple solution is to let users use password less logins. Even though it’s been around since 2016, more websites are implementing this practice nowadays.

A good example of a company going password-less is Microsoft. According to them, they will be removing passwords during the next major update for Windows 10. This could mean that sometime in the future Microsoft will use Windows Hello face authentication, fingerprints, or a PIN code for their PCs.

Dark Theme

Dark theme is getting more and more popular. This is mainly because people who read at night tend to get eye strain when they read using normal mode. The blue light also causes delay in release of melatonin which can cause sleepless nights.

Dark theme is more eye-friendly and now that Android and iOS are embracing it, you can expect this trend to gain traction and to stay long-term.

Air Gesture

Gesture control is another UX mobile trend that aims to make mobile experiences better. Air gestures allow you to interact with the screen without touching it. Using simple gestures you can answer phone calls, navigate web pages, scroll through image and change music.

Both Google and iOS are using air gestures.

The biggest advantage of air gesture is its intuitiveness and sensitivity to touch. This is why air gesture will always be a trend even if other trends come and go.

Responsive UX

In today’s quickly growing design business, it is more important to be Device Agnostic. It is no longer trendy for designers to be choosy as to which platform they get to design for.

The purpose of design in today’s world is to provide a seamless experience to each and every user regardless of what kind of device to use to access the internet.

Photo Driven Interfaces

Thanks to advancements in technology, websites today are utilizing more real-time pictures. Photography is becoming a big factor when choosing design themes and this is not only for photography websites. Combining amazing photographs and UX design is making websites more interactive and attractive.

The purpose of course is not to confuse users with a lot of pictures. Designers need to maintain substantial margins, spacing, whitespaces, and color balance.

Wrap Up

There is no denying the popularity of laptops, tablets and smartphones nowadays. These devices have become an important part of our lives and UX designers need to respond to these changes.

It is now becoming clearer that designing apps and programs that gives users a good experience is essential in the success of an app. However, UX should also include all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the business, its products, and its services.

A good UX designer in Sydney can help boost your website and business performance.  Their tailored web app solutions can get you ahead of the game and reduce tension with personalized services.

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